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Mortgage Repayment Calculators

There's much talk in the industry about the advantages and disadvantages of using a mortgage repayment calculator before you take up a specific loan deal. The development of various repayment tool sites on the Internet has certainly given consumers a lot more choice but has also brought along some extra problems with it.

The biggest issue comes from web sites that put a calculator on site purely to entice consumers in only for them to be bombarded with pop-up adverts and enticing offers to take out a mortgage with a little known financial services company. Some sites also encourage you to arrange a call via email from a financial advisor rather than giving immediate calculator access, which may not be what you want at all. To be honest these sites can give the mortgage repayment calculator market a bad name and it pays to be careful when using them (especially as some of their calculators don't even give accurate estimates!)

On the whole however a mortgage repayment calculator can be an extremely valuable guide in a consumer's search for the perfect mortgage. As the name suggests this type of tool is designed to help assess exactly how much your monthly repayment will cost you. It can also help you work out how much you can borrow based on your current salary. After all, it's easy to look at percentage loan rates and work out which one is the lowest but few of us have the mathematical ability to then estimate its actual monthly payment in real terms. A calculator will do all of this hard work for you.

The average mortgage repayment calculator will give you various options. You can choose between a repayment based on an interest only or, as is more common, a capital and interest repayment mortgage. In some cases, it will be enabled to work with a flexible mortgage so you can see for yourself the cost and time savings you can make by paying more towards your mortgage than the basic repayment cost.

Your experience may differ according to whose calculator you use. If you opt to use one that is affiliated to a specific lender site then they may insert relevant interest rates for you. Many general sites, however, will do the calculating work for you but you'll be expected to input the rates yourself. Some sites offer loan broker options - in which case you may be able to use a comparison tool to give you a market overview.

In all cases it pays to look at a few different calculating products including some from reputable lender sites. One thing that lenders don't tend to advertise is that one mortgage repayment calculator may not give the same results as another one. These tools do not have to be set up with the same formula on all sites and some lenders also add in other service costs to the calculation such as building and contents insurance premiums.

The big advantage that a mortgage repayment calculator brings to the consumer is speed of information. The days of having to visit a lender or talk to them on the phone to find out what their rates mean in 'real' monthly outgoings are long gone. With a mortgage calculator you can speed up your entry into the market by assessing what you can afford to borrow - both in terms of loan size and in payment costs. This type of tool can make shopping around for the best deal that much easier - which can save all of us money in the long run.