Online Home Mortgage Calculators: Keep Your "American Dream" from Becoming a Nightmare

Whether you are looking to buy a home, shop for a mortgage, refinance a mortgage, compare buying vs. renting, estimate an early payoff, or calculate and compare PMI, monthly payments, or interest rates, the home mortgage calculators in this section will eventually expand to cover all of your dwelling buying, owning, selling, and renting calculator needs.

Unlike other websites that offer home mortgage calculators, I have no vested interest in whether you buy or rent, which house you buy, or which mortgage company you choose.

This means that I am completely free to create home mortgage calculators that hold your best interests at heart, not the best interests of real estate brokers, banks, or mortgage companies.

Shame On Our Public Educational System

If you're like the rest of us, you were never taught to be your own financial expert. Sadly, our public educational system refuses to add "personal finance" to its list of K-12 mandatory subjects. Apparently, they would rather spend years teaching us subjects that we will never use enough to remember, instead of teaching us time-value-of-money, economics, and finance -- something every single one of us will need and use every day for the rest of our lives.

Had we been taught the economic and financial concepts that are absolutely critical to successful personal money management, most of us would now be free to discover and pursue a work that we love while happily living within our means -- free of the suffocating constraints of debt.

Instead, we left 12-years of public education only to be shoved out into a highly complex financial world, completely void of any meaningful training in how to accurately forecast the consequences of our financial actions and inactions.

Had we been taught what we needed to know, not only would we know that every single action or inaction we take has financial consequences, but we would also be able to accurately forecast those consequences for the purpose of making wise, self-supporting financial decisions.

So Who's Been Helping You Make Your Financial Decisions?

Because our public education system never taught us the critical elements of maximizing our financial happiness, we end up relying on others to help us make our financial decisions. The problem is, these "others" have a vested interest in the outcome of our decisions. And because they stand to gain from our decisions, these "others" are only going to exaggerate and emphasize the upside of taking their advice, while downplaying and ignoring the downside (that is, unless the government steps in and forces the "others" to include the drawbacks in unreadable fine print).

As a result of relying on the advice of these self-serving "others," most of us have spent our entire lives acting in their best interests, rather than acting in our own best interests. And I, for one, am completely tired of seeing these "others" getting rich off of the ignorance of the rest of us. I hope you are too.

My goal for the financial calculators on this website is to help you to become fully aware of the drawbacks that our public school system failed to teach you, and to downplay the exaggerated benefits the "others" have been and are now and forever teaching you, all for the purpose of helping you to accurately forecast the financial consequences of your actions and inactions.

Once armed with this ability it will be almost as if you've been given a crystal ball that allows you to see ahead of time what will happen to your future when choosing one alternative action over another.

Keys to Forecasting the Consequences of Your Dwelling Decisions

Throughout the home mortgage calculators section, I hope to bring to light the following, little talked about, yet all-important concepts you will need to be aware of to accurately forecast the consequences of your dwelling decisions.

• Why buying a home is a poor investment.
• What causes us to unknowingly buy homes we can't afford?
• The hidden and opportunity costs of homeownership that real estate and mortgage companies don't want you to be aware of.
• How buying a home versus renting can result in less happiness.
• Why buying a larger home yields a lower per-dollar return.
• How to live in a home for free.
• The high cost of instant gratification.
• How to pay off your mortgage early and make a fortune in the process.
• The real cost of home equity loans.
• When does refinancing your home mortgage make sense?
• How to save on private mortgage insurance.
• Why you need to own your home for a minimum length of time.

Hopefully, after studying the bite-sized lessons and using the home mortgage calculators in this section, you will have all the information you need to make smart, self-supporting, and emotionally profitable decisions concerning buying, renting, and owning a dwelling.