How Much Can You Afford?

When buying a home, one of the most important and most difficult questions to answer is “How much can I afford?” With price tags in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s hard to determine what those prices will equate to on a monthly basis.

To make it easier to answer this question, Zillow recently released a new monthly payment feature at the top of every home details page. This feature shows what the monthly payment would be on that house, if you were to purchase it with a 30-year fixed mortgage with 20% down, using today’s mortgage rates.

If you have more or less than 20% to put down on the house, or you were thinking about getting a different type of mortgage, you can just click the edit button to change the assumptions to fit your criteria, and the payment will automatically recalculate using the most current mortgage rates.

To give you a complete sense of what your total monthly costs will be, the monthly payment includes estimated taxes and insurance. If you want to see the mortgage principle and interest payment only, simply uncheck the box just above the estimated payment amount in the edit screen.

Once you find a home that you can budget into your monthly expenses, you can get a jump start on securing financing for it by visiting Zillow Mortgage Marketplace to get custom loan quotes, anonymously.