If you’re in the home buying and mortgage loan market, 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 you get further into the home buying process, you might find yourself running a lot of numbers, especially if you are looking at investment property. When searching around for the best possible mortgage calculator online, you might find a couple decent ones, but nothing that’ll blow your mind.
The developers of the UWS Mortgage Calculator took a different approach.
Their first step was to assess what was missing in the existing loan calculators:
Speed. You need to click the submit button every time you 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, you want to see a 30-year, 15-year, 10-year, 5-year side-by-side so you can compare.Portability. Not one of them looks good on a mobile browser.Flexibility. You 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. You resize your browser and find yourself scrolling horizontally to get your results.Version one of the UWS Mortgage Calculator was released, in hopes that it’s well received by many frustrated home buyers and investors. To better describe how they’ve dealt with the six issues I identified above:
Speed – Say good by to the submit button, it’s a click you 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. Adding new loan terms and loans all-together is easily accomplished.
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, they 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.
This is only the beginning, they have high hopes that this will eventually be the tool of choice for anyone in the home buying process.