I've been following house prices for a few years, watching what I think is a huge housing bubble develope in Canada. Anyways, I often run little mortgage scenario's on houses just for fun to see how out of whack things are (the average family not being able to afford even a cheap home, etc, etc), and I did a google search for mortgage calculators and found something that I think is interesting.
This site: http://www.mortgagecalculator.net/ that is hosted by who knows, doesn't allow you to put in an interest rate above 9.0 percent. It seems to just not compute and won't show you any numbers? Anyways, that is just out to lunch since interest rates over the past 30 years have been up to 21%, and average around 8% or so. Yeah, they are stupid low now, but it doesn't mean they can't ever go past 9%? Just crazy.
And then I find this other site hosted by the BBC in the UK and they let you enter in your interest rate etc, and in the results they have a "But be careful, at 12% it will be:" amount. Which is exactly what people need to know! So anyways, a nice example of stupid vs sensible. http://www.bbc.co.uk/homes/property/mortgagecalculator.shtml
posted at: 13:29 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry