Start with the home price and the amount of cash you plan to put down. Then enter the interest rate from your lender and the length of the loan in years. The boxes for yearly property tax, yearly home insurance and monthly HOA fees are optional, but filling them in gives you a much more honest monthly figure, because lenders look at the full cost of owning the home and not only the loan payment.
If your down payment is less than twenty percent of the price, you can also type in a yearly mortgage insurance rate and the calculator will add it to your monthly bill. Press Calculate and you will see your total monthly payment, the loan amount, the share of the price you are paying upfront and a clear split of every part of the payment. You will also see how much interest you pay across the whole loan.
Try changing the down payment, the rate or the term a few times. Small changes often move the monthly payment and the total interest by a surprising amount, and this is the quickest way to find a loan setup that fits your budget.
The monthly principal and interest payment comes from the standard loan formula: payment = loan x r / (1 – (1 + r) raised to minus n). Here r is the yearly rate divided by 100 and then by 12, and n is the number of monthly payments, which is the years multiplied by 12. If the rate is zero, the payment is just the loan divided by n.
Property tax and insurance are divided by 12 and added on top, and HOA fees are added as they are. Mortgage insurance is the loan amount times the yearly rate, divided by 12. Total interest is the monthly payment multiplied by n, minus the loan amount.