House and Loan Match-Ups

In the course of searching for a home, you will begin to compare and match the different house and loan options at your disposal. We considered about 11 houses and 5 loan offers, and needed to find the best financial match (numbers only). It can be mind-boggling to keep mental note of everything, but that's what computers are for. So I added a feature in our financial app to do the match ups and analysis.

Below is an example of one such analysis. You can review how much money you must have on hand to close on a particular house with a certain lender. Don't forget to account for earnest money, inspection fees, and appraisal fees, which are paid before closing. The lender's GFE might not include these fees. After closing, consider any penalties for breaking your current contracts, moving costs, and stuff you must buy for the new home during first few months, in addition to your usual monthly expenses.

For the houses we considered high possibilities and loans we found reasonable, we entered that data in the application. We could then pair up any house and loan to see what the numbers came to, given a certain down payment. Most importantly, we wanted to know how much money we'll have spent by the end of the first month in the house, and ensure that it would be available when we make an offer.

I did not have enough time to complete the feature, but I had intended to further implement active analysis, where the application would also consider our house requirements and our weighted observations from house tours to help us determine the best value. It would consider our funding sources and monthly budget (since we track them in the application) to give us a rough estimate of our financial picture over the first year. It would obviously exclude current rent and make informed adjustments to utilities and gasoline costs to produce an good estimate. I think it would have been a cool feature. Apparently a weekend is not enough for this kind of work.