If this is your first time visiting, check out the story behind this blog. Otherwise, please join the others by subscribing to my RSS feed or get updates via email so you don't miss any personal finance articles!

Being a numbers guy, I was always calculating how much I needed to pay monthly once I bought my dream house. I remember a year ago when my wife and I almost bought a house, I was using my pen and paper to write down all the necessary expenses like property taxes, home owners insurance. As a result, I gave my readers an option to calculate all this in an electronic form up at the top of the page.

Fast forward a year from now. I still haven’t bought my house, so the need for a mortgage calculator is still in tact but I found one that puts what I have in shame! Luckily, the website I came across has a free widget that I can embed into my site so I will be implementing that fairly soon on my website for all readers to enjoy.

The tool that I came across can be reached at mlcalc.com. Once you get to the main page, the page provides a clean and simple interface for two main calculators: Mortgage Calculator and Loan Calculator. The only difference between the calculators are that the mortgage calculator lets you put in variables like your down payment, property tax, property insurance and private mortgage insurance (PMI - the bank sometimes requires this if you put in a down payment of less than 20%) which you can see on the left.

Once you click calculate, the results are given in chart and table form so the exact monthly payment is shown like below. Note that I cut off the data after year 2019 to save space but the calculator gives out a full 30 years of data.

The pretty colors and easy to read layout are what originally attracted me to this calculator. However, now that I’ve played around with it, I believe I can easily use this with my internet enabled phone to negotiate with any lender right on the spot whether I’m buying a car or house! If you are always trying to come up with your own way to calculate your mortgage payment, why not give this a spin?