How much house your income could carry
A debt-to-income test starts with your income, takes out what you already owe every month, and sees what is left for housing. How much house you can afford is whatever that budget carries, with property taxes and insurance inside it. Put in a rate and this works out the price.
Affordability
What that works out to
- Purchase price you can reach
- Needs a rate
- Loan amount
- Needs a rate
- Room for housing each month
- $3,270
Enter the rate you have been quoted and the numbers appear. We do not publish rates.
These are estimates from the figures you entered, not a quote, an offer, or a commitment to lend.
A calculator works from the figures you typed into it. Your loan officer works from your file and your credit, against the lenders on our panel.
Ask us for a real quoteHow the math works
This calculator works to a back-end debt-to-income ceiling: your total monthly debts, the new housing payment included, as a share of your gross monthly income. Multiply the income by that ceiling, take off the debts you already carry, and what is left is the housing budget.
Then the payment formula runs backwards. The budget has to cover principal and interest, property taxes, homeowners insurance, mortgage insurance and HOA dues, so the loan amount we want is the one whose whole monthly cost fills the budget exactly.
Property taxes make that less simple than it sounds, because they scale with the price and the price is what we are solving for. It is solved algebraically rather than by guessing and checking, so the answer is exact instead of close.
Your down payment is added to the loan to get the price, because it is cash in hand rather than something you are borrowing. It also decides whether mortgage insurance is charged, so the loan is solved both with the premium and without it and the self-consistent answer is the one you see.
Starting assumptions
The payment and affordability calculators open on general starting figures rather than an empty form. Each one is labelled as an assumption, and you can change every one of them.
- Property taxes follow California's capped base rate plus the local bonds and assessments for the tax rate area a house sits in.
- Homeowners insurance goes in as an annual figure. A real premium depends on the house and the insurer, so use your own quote if you have one.
- In these calculators, mortgage insurance is charged only while the loan is large against the home's value. On a real loan the program decides whether and for how long it is charged, and the insurer, not us, sets the premium.
- HOA dues start at nothing. Put in the dues if the home belongs to an association.
- The debt-to-income ceiling is a starting assumption, not the limit on your file. Each program and lender sets its own.
- The loan term is a selector, because the length you pay over is your assumption and not something we advertise.
These are estimates from the figures you entered, not a quote, an offer, or a commitment to lend.
Pick the question you are trying to answer
- Monthly payment
What leaves your account each month once taxes, insurance and dues are inside the figure.
- Refinance break-even
The month the closing costs are paid back, and what the new loan costs over its life.
- Amortization schedule
Every payment, split into interest and principal, year by year.
A quote needs your file
Send us what you are working with, and your loan officer can price it against the lenders on our panel.
No credit pull to get started. This is not a commitment to lend. Equal Housing Opportunity.