mortgages

A home is often one of the biggest purchases you will ever make, so it goes without saying that buying a home can be a really stressful undertaking. That's why it's important to go into it fully prepared. Mortgage+Care Loan Calculator offers just the right amount of tools to help you calculate your monthly payments for mortgages and other major purchases.

This program's user interface is as basic as it gets. A small window that acts as the main menu appears with different calculation tools: Payment Calculator, Amortization Schedule (it's misspelled on the menu; a … Read more

Mortgage and Loan Calculator Analyzer from Debt Management Tool by TSI: It actually takes about as long to type that out as it does to display detailed information about your home mortgage, provided, of course, that you have your records and figures handy. It's optimized for mortgages, but it can calculate the rates and schedules for other loans, too.

Mortgage and Loan Calculator Analyzer opens with an example mortgage displayed in its businesslike interface, with several other examples available in the Mortgage List field. Large buttons labeled Add, Copy, and Delete let us remove the examples easily when we … Read more

Streamline Your Debt is a free tool that analyzes your home mortgage and shows you ways to reduce your payments or pay your loan off more quickly by using a Home Equity Line of Credit. While it's not the most intuitive tool we've used, its summaries offer useful data that can help guide your decisions.

We extracted the compressed download and clicked the executable file. Streamline Your Debt's simple interface opened with a tabbed Startup Wizard that let us enter home, HELOC, and income and expense data. We entered data for House Value, Loan Value, Interest Rate, … Read more

Home Mortgage Calculator from Vertex42 is a free Excel spreadsheet template for calculating fixed and variable rate home mortgages. That sounds useful but not very exciting, which is a fairly good description of Excel spreadsheets in general. However, Home Mortgage Calculator is more than just a page full of tables. It incorporates many automated features and options, but better still, its clear explanations, numerous examples, and graphical displays make it easy not only to calculate mortgage rates but also get a better overview of your mortgage. To use Home Mortgage Calculator, you will need Microsoft Excel 2002 or above.

We … Read more

Home Loan Interest Manager Pro provides a tool for monitoring every aspect of mortgages. While the program can get overwhelming, it ultimately helps users understand home loans.

With the program's many command options, we smartly headed to the topic-oriented Help file. This, along with the program's wizard, showed us how to navigate our loan within minutes. We needed to have a lot of information present to fill out the wizard (Interest rates, loan amounts, duration of the loan, etc.), but it was worth the hassle since it laid the foundation of our mortgage. Some other options were much … Read more

It sure is hard to keep your home these days, and it's not a good time to sell it, either. But if you just want to look around, checking the market, it has never been more convenient.

Recently, I blogged about how you can search for a new home on your iPhone, but now, if you own a BlackBerry or any other smartphone, you can do that, too.

Coldwell Banker, the company that released the iPhone-optimized home-hunting Web site, announced recently its new Web sites designed specifically for BlackBerry and other smartphone users.

BlackBerry owners can just go to … Read more

Real estate site Zillow is set to launch on Thursday a service that will let borrowers get quotes anonymously and lenders get leads for free.

People applying for home loans online now have to supply personal information to get quotes. Their information is often sold to other marketers, their credit rating can get harmed from so many credit checks, and the rates are usually higher than initially advertised.

Zillow's Mortgage Marketplace aims to solve those problems. Borrowers fill out detailed loan request forms but do not provide any personally identifiable information. When customized quotes are available, the borrowers get … Read more

Call us rubes, but we didn't know that you could buy a car through Saks Fifth Avenue. And not just any car, but a 2007 Mercedes CL600 Saks Special Edition.

There it was, about halfway through the catalog, nestled between ads for Narciso Rodriguez perfume and a Vera Wang silk chiffon gown. The Mercedes features exclusive "Mystic White" metallic paint, Porcelain Nappa leather, and Piano Lacquer Black wood trim--oh, and a 510-horsepower BiTurbo V12 engine that can go from zero to 60 in 4.5 seconds.

So start checking your PayPal balances now--only 20 of the cars … Read more