Karl's Mortgage Calculator Review

Karl’s mortgage calculator, available at http://www.jeacle.ie/mortgage/, offers so many pertinent features for analyzing mortgage financing and repayment options that it’s hard to quit playing with it. That’s a good thing; because it makes understanding different mortgage terms and conditions easy to see and understand, even for a novice. All mortgages are not created equal, and Karl’s mortgage calculator helps anyone to clearly see the differences quickly and easily.

The calculator is split into three sections for ease of use: sliders, graphs and tables, and input boxes.

If a quick snapshot of your estimated monthly mortgage payment is all you think you really need, the slider function on Karl’s mortgage calculator makes your task easy and quick. The slider function is set with your payment amount as the default option, so all you have to do is slide the mortgage term in years to the correct number, choose the start month, and enter your principal amount and your projected payment appears instantly on the payment slider.

The fun part of Karl’s mortgage calculator however is the table and graph sections. By plugging different numbers into the input boxes, you can see exactly when your principle payments will be larger than your interest payments, and how much interest you will pay over the life of the loan depending on how you set up the mortgage term. The graphs and tables also show how prepayments or extra payments impact your final payoff date, and even how an adjustable rate will play out over the life of the loan.

It’s one thing for someone to tell you that you pay less interest on a fifteen versus a thirty year mortgage. It’s quite a different experience to see the numbers right in front of you with illustrations to make them easy to understand. Thinking about numbers can be confusing when shopping for a mortgage, but as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

 Karl’s mortgage calculator instantly creates graphs and tables that show the interest in red, the principal in blue and extra payments in yellow, so you can see at a glance how your mortgage is set up. Individual payment breakdowns are available in standard amortization schedules, which are also presented at the click of a mouse. The net result is a user-friendly mortgage tool that teaches a novice more about mortgages in a few minutes than an afternoon seminar, yet is sophisticated enough for financial experts to use and enjoy too.

The amortization charts created by Karl’s mortgage calculator rely on a standard amortization formula which calculates mortgage interest once a month. Although this formula is commonly used worldwide, as Jeacle points out, some financial institutions now calculate interest on mortgage on a daily basis.

This information on how amortization is calculated is valuable even to a first time consumer, since it creates an opening for asking questions of if the payment amount created by Karl’s mortgage calculator differs significantly from the one provided by the bank or broker estimate. A good lender will try to be as transparent as possible in regard to its lending practices. If you don’t get clear answers to direct questions that alone is a sign that it might be time to shop around a bit more.

Karl’s mortgage calculator is available in fifteen different languages and is a Java based program. If you don’t already have it, you can download Java at http://java.com/ . Canadian mortgages are charged interest once every six months in stead of once every month. A formula for converting US estimated payments to Canadian ones and vice versa is also included at the website.

A variety of other good financial calculators created by Karl are available at: www.drcalculator.com, and include a standard ‘how much can I afford’ mortgage calculator, a balloon payment calculator, a prequalification calculator, and a variety of other useful money tools.