If you’re in the home buying and mortgage loan market like I am, you’ve no doubt come across a few online mortgage calculators that give you a quick assessment of your monthly payment, given a few variables like home value, property tax, and term of the loan. They certainly save you a few bucks on purchasing one of those fancy interest calculators from Radio Shack (do they still make those?).
As I got further into the home buying process, I found myself running a lot of numbers, especially since this will be an investment property. I searched around for the best possible mortgage calculator online, and found a couple decent ones, but nothing that blew my mind.
So it finally clicked. I’m a web programmer, I’m buying a home and will need a mortgage. Why don’t I build my dream mortgage calculator!
The first step was to assess what was missing in the existing loan calculators:
- Speed. I need to click the submit button every time I change the numbers, or want to see a different loan term.
- Accessibility. The desire to view more than one loan term at a time. For instance, I want to see a 30-year, 15-year, 10-year, 5-year side-by-side so I can compare.
- Portability. Not one of them looks good on a mobile browser.
- Flexibility. I might want to start with a monthly payment, and work backwards.
- Simplicity. While graphs, amortization charts and market news are great, they really clutter up the interface.
- Responsiveness. I resize my browser and I find myself scrolling horizontally to get my results.
That being said, forgive the title of this article, it’s not an ego thing. It’s more of a goal. With the above six measures in mind, I’ve started Universal Web Services first, in hopefully a long line of online productivity applications.
Version one of the UWS Mortgage Calculator was released today, and I hope it’s well received by many frustrated home buyers and investors. To better describe how I’ve dealt with the six issues I identified above:
Speed – Say good by to the submit button, it’s a click we just don’t need. Instead, any time you press a key, the numbers will automatically update. This is probably the biggest improvement over existing mortgage calculators. It gives you the ability to run numbers quickly, if you want to test various scenarios.
Accessibility – Currently, you can view up to 4 loan terms side-by-side. On a mobile, you’re limited to 2 or 3 due to space constraints. In the future, I plan to offer the ability to add or remove additional loan terms.
Portability – It scales down to a mobile browser nicely, removing unnecessary elements to save space.
Flexibility – You can adjust the term, monthly payment, total payments, tax, pmi at any point. The other fields will update automatically. Not just the loan term you changed, but all loan terms!
Simplicity – Just the calculator. You know what property tax is, and don’t need an explanation to fill extra space. The only clutter you’ll find is a couple ads. Hey, I need to put food on the table too 🙂
Responsiveness – Not everyone has a 32″ computer monitor, but some people might. We accommodate everyone by allowing the site to “flex” to the size of your display.
I hope this is enough to get you interested. As I said before, this is only the beginning, I have high hopes that this will eventually be the tool of choice for anyone in the home buying process.
