Nov 15

Did you ever use a mortgage calculator to figure out your monthly mortgage payments? I recently calculated mortgage payments for a $600,000 home loan. I was surprised that I could afford the monthly mortgage payments on a 15 year home loan. If you’re in the process of buying a home or refinancing your home you should use a mortgage calculator.

You enter mortgage rates today, the loan amount and any other information like real estate taxes and PMI to figure out your monthly mortgage payments. With current mortgage rates on 15 year home loans at 3.00% you should look into refinancing your mortgage loan. Current savings account rates and CD rates are also very low right now, there are also CD calculators and savings account calculators you can use when investing.

When I was calculating monthly mortgage payments I was able to compare my monthly payments including the real estate taxes I have to pay the county, homeowners insurance and of course the refinance rates I was qouted on a refinance.  Many calculators give you the ability to add these two items in separate lines, the good thing is you don’t have to break the payments on taxes and insurance down by month, you’re able to put the annual amount in and get the monthly amount.

Mortgage calculators with amortization schedules are even better than regular calculators. One can view their monthly mortgage payments each and every month you see how much interest you pay and mortgage principal you pay.

An amortization schedule is paying off of debt in regular installments over a period of time which will show the amount of equity you build up in your home monthly and annually. I was happy to see how much equity I am able to build up in the first 3 years of paying off my loan.

Anyone looking into getting a home loan should use a calculator because it help you quickly figure out what your payments will be. When I used a mortgage calculator I compared 30 year mortgages with 1 point, 2 points and 3 points. I found that since I’m staying in my home for a very long time, at least I plan too; it made sense to get a 30 year rate at 3.75% with 3 points. .

By mortgage calculating the monthly payments helps you figure out how much house you can afford and a good mortgage calculator gives you the ability to figure out everything down to the last dollar on the monthly payments since some calculators also have a prepayment section.

The mortgage prepayment section allows one to figure out how much interest charges one will save by paying down the mortgage loan faster like in bi-weekly payments.

Paying down your mortgage loan faster you save even more in interest changes, the savings quickly adds up to a lot of money, tens of thousands of dollars in fact.