What Can You Afford
It's a good idea to know approximately how much money you can borrow for a home before you spend time looking for a new house. An affordability calculator will use information about a loan (such as interest rate and the length of the loan), the cost of taxes and insurance for the property, your debts (auto loans, credit card debt, etc), and your income to calculate the maximum mortgage you might obtain.
Monthly Payment
Your monthly mortgage payment is made up of a variety of costs, including principal, interest, taxes and insurance. A payment calculator considers all these and gives you your actual monthly payment. This is an important figure to know when determining whether or not you can afford a loan. Remember that even if you're able to obtain a loan, you still have to make the monthly payment.
Rent or Buy?
This wonderful tool will show you how much money you'll save or lose by renting, and how great a benefit buying a home might be. This calculator allows you to change the number of years used in the calculation, which is important because that can make the difference between whether renting is more advantageous or not. For example, if you were wanting to purchase a house and sell it after five years and wanted to compare it to renting for five years, you'd enter a "5" into the appropriate field in the calculator. The calculator might then tell you that you'd save $80,000 in monthly payments by renting. You'd also see that if you were to buy a home, even though you'd pay more money while you owned the house, when you sold it you'd earn both what you would have saved by renting AND an additional $5,000.
Refinancing Your Mortgage
You might want to refinance if it lowers your monthly payment or the total amount paid for your home. A calculator can help you decide this. How soon you'll sell your home after refinancing is important data this calculator will consider. For example, if you sell your house in five years, your savings due to refinancing might be $1,500. Waiting five additional years (for a total of ten) would increase your total savings to $4,000. However, if you wait too long, say 25 years before selling, you'd end up losing $7,500. That's why this calculator is important.
Loan Comparison
There are a variety of loan products available out there. In order to know which is best, you need a loan comparison calculator that considers interest rates, points, and closing costs. You can then compare the loans based on important factors such as the monthly payment and the total cost over the life of the loan. Some loans also have mortgage insurance associated with them, but many calculators might not take this into account, so be careful.
Bi-Weekly Payments
Want to know if paying off your mortgage every two weeks will actually help you save money over paying once a month? There's a calculator for this too. It can show you how much quicker you'll pay off the loan and how much you'll save in interest. Because you won't pay as much in interest by paying every two weeks, you could lose out on some tax benefits. A good calculator will take this into account and show you a "net savings" by taking into account the loss in tax savings.
These mortgage calculators can assist you in deciding whether to refinance or buy a home.
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