Answers, including the awkward ones

No. Ropewalk Mortgage Co. is fictional, built to demonstrate a website. It holds no licence, has no NMLS identifier and cannot originate a loan. The people, the office address, the comments and every figure on the site are invented. No form here sends anything anywhere, and nothing on the site is an offer of credit.

Because a rate table goes stale the week it ships, and an APR is a regulated disclosure that implies a cost of credit this fictional lender has not computed and could not honour. Every figure a calculator here returns is arithmetic on a number you typed in yourself, and each page lists the assumptions behind it.

A fictional company has no reputation to average. There is no aggregate score, no review count, and no AggregateRating in the structured data — a rich-result star row built on invented comments is a fabrication that search engines repeat.

A made-up identifier in the exact format a regulator issues is not safe because it is made up — it can collide with a working broker’s. A real lender would publish its unique identifier here and link it to NMLS Consumer Access so you could verify it. This demonstration publishes none, and says so rather than leaving a gap.

No. 18 Hawser Walk is an invented street. Providence and the ZIP code are real, because a city and a postcode place a business without pointing at a building. The site also publishes no latitude or longitude anywhere in its structured data — four decimal places is about eleven metres, and a demonstration has no business putting a company that does not exist inside a real building to that precision.

It has not been independently audited, so it makes no conformance claim. What it does claim is specific and checkable: semantic landmarks and heading order, visible focus on every interactive element, keyboard operation throughout including the calculators, text contrast measured on composited pixels in both themes and under every palette, targets of at least 44 by 44 pixels, and motion that genuinely stops when you ask it to — including the canvas, whose animation loop is torn down rather than slowed.

Three things, and only if you agree: your theme, your colour palette and your accessibility settings, kept in your own browser so they survive a reload. There is no analytics, no advertising pixel, no session cookie and no third-party script anywhere on the site. If you choose not to store anything, one entry records that choice so you are not asked again — and the preference writer then genuinely refuses to write.

No, and this is the single most common error in published mortgage calculators. Conventional PMI ends automatically when the scheduled balance reaches 78% of the original value, under the Homeowners Protection Act of 1998. FHA annual MIP follows a different rule entirely: on a loan longer than fifteen years it runs for eleven years if the loan-to-value at closing was 90% or less, and otherwise for the full term. USDA charges its annual fee for the life of the loan. VA charges no monthly insurance at all, only a one-time funding fee. Applying the conventional rule to an FHA loan understates the borrower’s own payment by a five-figure sum over the life of the loan.

The note rate is what interest accrues at. The APR expresses the cost of credit as a yearly rate including certain finance charges, which is why it is usually higher. Two loans with the same rate can have very different APRs, and two with the same APR can have very different rates — which is why comparing on one number alone is a mistake.

Usually. Documenting income from deposits rather than tax returns puts a loan outside the qualified-mortgage box, and that carries a price. The honest comparison is not against a conforming rate you cannot document; it is against not buying, or buying later. How much it matters depends on the gap and on how long you expect to hold the loan before refinancing.

No. Extra principal shortens the term; the required payment stays the same. If you want a lower payment from a lump sum, ask the servicer about a recast — re-amortising the remaining balance over the remaining term — which typically costs a few hundred dollars rather than a few thousand. Not every servicer offers it.

A gap of 30 days or more in the last two years needs a written explanation.

Income from a job you have held for under six months is usually averaged, not annualised.

Unreimbursed business expenses on a Schedule A can reduce the figure that is used.

A 50% expense factor is a default, not a law. A CPA-supported factor can be materially better or worse.

Large irregular deposits are usually excluded unless you can source them.

Personal-account programmes count a different set of deposits and price differently.

The preparer must be independent of you; a statement you prepared yourself will not be used.

A P&L that disagrees with your bank statements will be questioned, and the lower figure tends to win.

One quarter of unusual revenue does not make an annual income.

The discount and the divisor differ sharply between programmes; they set the answer.

Assets used for the down payment cannot also be counted as income.

A gift or a recent large deposit will need to be sourced and may be excluded.

Some programmes deduct a vacancy allowance before the ratio is worked out; some do not. It moves the answer.

A short-term-let history is treated very differently from a signed twelve-month lease.

The ratio says nothing about maintenance, management or a month with no tenant.

It depends on the programme, not on the folklore. Conventional loans start at three per cent for eligible buyers, FHA at three and a half, and VA and USDA at nothing for those who qualify. The larger question is what the deposit does to the mortgage insurance and the rate, which the payment calculator on this site itemises.

A full pre-approval involves a hard credit enquiry, which typically moves a score by a few points and recovers. Multiple mortgage enquiries within a short window are treated as one by the main scoring models, so shopping several lenders in the same fortnight does not compound the effect.

Sometimes. Two years of self-employment is the conventional standard, but some programmes will consider one year with a strong prior history in the same line of work, and bank-statement programmes have their own seasoning rules. It is a question worth asking specifically rather than assuming the answer.

There is no threshold, despite the folklore about one per cent. What matters is the cost of the refinance against the interest it avoids over the time you will actually keep the loan. On a large balance a quarter of a point can pay back quickly; on a small one a full point may never.

It depends on whether cash or total cost is the constraint. Rolling them in means nothing leaves your pocket, so the cash-flow break-even disappears — but the costs now accrue interest for the life of the loan, and the total-cost break-even moves out.

A large lump payment followed by the servicer re-amortising the remaining balance over the remaining term, which lowers the payment without a new loan. It usually costs a few hundred dollars rather than a few thousand, and not every servicer offers it. Worth asking about before assuming a refinance is the only route to a lower payment.

It varies with the route, the property and the season, and any site quoting you a number in days is guessing. What is knowable is what makes it longer: an appraisal that has to be reconsidered, a title defect, a self-employed file assembled piece by piece, and a rate lock that expires and has to be extended.

The lender lends against the appraised value, not the contract price. The gap is bridged by renegotiating with the seller, paying the difference in cash, disputing the appraisal with comparable sales, or walking away if the contract allows it. Which is available depends on the contract you signed.

Yes, and occasionally you should. It costs you the appraisal fee and restarts the clock, so it is worth doing only when something is materially wrong — a fee that appeared, a rate that was not honoured, a file that has not moved in three weeks with no explanation.

It depends on the programme: broadly 620 for conventional, 580 for FHA at three and a half per cent down, and 500 to 579 with ten per cent down. Lenders apply their own overlays on top, so a programme minimum is a floor rather than a guarantee.

No. Rent buys housing and flexibility; a mortgage payment buys housing and a slowly growing share of an asset, and roughly the first third of it is interest, which is also not recoverable. The rent-versus-buy calculator on this site does the comparison properly, with both sides treated the same way.

Usually worth investigating, and worth doing early. They typically carry income limits, a homebuyer-education requirement and a repayment or forgiveness structure on the assistance, and they take longer to arrange than a standard file. The cost is time; the benefit is often several thousand dollars.