Owning a home is a huge part of the American Dream. Your home is a place where you’ll build memories, raise a family, and hopefully grow old with your loved one. While Bloomberg currently reports that home prices in the United States are rising slowly, buying your own home is still a major financial decision.
The average U.S. home price is around $300,000, and as such, you want to make sure that you know what you’re doing. When you buy a home, unless you are paying the entire sum, you are most likely going to take out a mortgage. When you take out a mortgage, you want to have an accurate idea of what you’ll be paying per month. To do this, a few websites offer mortgage calculators. One popular option is the Zillow mortgage calculator.
Overview of Zillow
There are many different types of services that offer mortgage payment estimates. In this case, Zillow is a very popular real estate website that allows you to look at homes in your area, have an overview of rentals, find an agent for your home search, gain advice, find home design tips, and even calculate your monthly mortgage payments. Using a calculator for your mortgage payments can help you make better financial decisions. Here’s how the Zillow Mortgage calculator works:
Zillow’s mortgage calculator is located on the website’s Mortgage Education Center. This center is a resource that provides you with all of the information that you need to know regarding your home mortgage. When it comes to the mortgage calculator, there are a number of options you can choose from. These options include a monthly payment calculator, affordability calculator, mortgage refinance calculator, credit score estimate calculator, and even a calculator to review the closing costs of your home. The one that is of interest for the purposes of this post is the mortgage calculator.
This calculator allows you to review an estimate of your monthly mortgage payments which even include taxes and insurance. To calculate your mortgage, the process is very easy. All you need to insert into the calculator is the price of the home, the down payment, and the interest rate. This will then provide you with your monthly mortgage payment, the tax, and insurance per month. The initial chart of your payments that you see on your screen can also be made more advanced.
The Advanced Chart
The advanced chart provides you with a much thorough analysis of your payments. This advanced analysis includes feature such as how much your mortgage payments will grow over a period of time, the principal interest, property taxes, homeowners insurance, private mortgage insurance, homeowners association dues, and it will even include what you’ll pay per month for the first year.
After the first year, it even provides you with what you’ll pay every month through the entire payment process. This thorough analysis is a tool that allows you a very in depth overview of your mortgage payments that allow you to have a positive control over your finances. Furthermore, knowing your mortgage payments per month over the payment period will also help you plan better for your future.
Help Tools
Finally, apart from the calculator, there is also a nifty help feature that explains everything about the calculator and how to correctly analyze the data that calculator presents to you. With this feature, you can ensure that what you are looking at is accurate and that you understand the financial data presented.
Overall, the Zillow mortgage calculator is a positive tool to help you manage your finances better. You get a good idea of your monthly mortgage payment and how it is broken down per month during the payment period. With this tool, you gain an asset to make the best decision for your finances and your future.
