Twenty-six questions, and four answers of no.

Not with a rate, and not with a programme name. Start with two numbers you already know: how much cash you can put in without emptying the account, and how long you realistically expect to keep the loan. Those two decide most of the rest. The programmes here differ mainly in what they charge on day one and what they keep charging every month, so your cash and your horizon narrow eight programmes to two or three before anybody has pulled your credit.

No, and no honest site can. A rate is the output of underwriting: your credit, your loan-to-value, the property type, the occupancy, the loan amount, the programme, the day, and the pricing of whoever will buy the loan. A number published before any of that is a guess wearing a decimal point. Plinth publishes no rates at all, which is why every calculator here asks you to type one in. The rate you enter is an assumption you are testing, not an offer anybody is making.

By elimination, and mostly on facts rather than preferences. Service history decides whether VA is available. The property address and your household income decide whether USDA is. The loan size against the conforming limit for your county decides whether the question is conventional or jumbo. Credit and down payment decide whether FHA or conventional is the more forgiving door. Four external facts remove most of the list, and only then does it become a matter of what you would prefer.

Depth of evidence. A pre-qualification is generally a conversation and a credit check against figures you have stated. A pre-approval usually means documents have been supplied and reviewed, and sometimes that an underwriter has looked at the file. Neither is a commitment to lend, and the two words are not used consistently between lenders, so ask what was actually verified rather than which label was printed on it. A seller’s agent will want the same answer.

No. FHA is the most forgiving credit door, which is a different claim. It charges an upfront premium of 1.75% of the base loan amount, and an annual premium that, on a thirty-year loan with less than 10% down, runs for the life of the loan. A conventional loan with private mortgage insurance that terminates under the Homeowners Protection Act can cost less across the years you actually keep it, even at a slightly higher rate. Price both over your horizon.

No. Conventional loans go as low as 3% on some products and 5% on most, FHA to 3.5%, and VA and USDA to nothing at all. Twenty per cent is not a requirement. It is the point at which conventional mortgage insurance is not charged in the first place. Below it you are buying sooner and paying insurance for a while, and the honest comparison is between those two things rather than between having the money and not having it.

Check the exact street address on USDA’s own eligibility map. Not the town, not the county, and not the impression the drive gives you. Suburban edges frequently qualify and genuinely remote places frequently do not, because the designation follows population data rather than atmosphere. Two houses on opposite sides of one road can answer differently. If the address fails, nothing else about the file will change that answer, which is why it is the first thing to check.

It is worth pricing, because VA charges no monthly mortgage insurance at all and that advantage never appears in a rate comparison. A down payment still helps you: it lowers the one-time funding fee tier, and it leaves you with equity, which matters a great deal if you sell early. The comparison to run is a VA loan with your down payment against a conventional loan with the same down payment, across the years you expect to stay.

No. Qualified Mortgage is a definition the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wrote under the ability-to-repay rule, and a loan falling outside that definition is a non-QM loan. It is a regulatory category, not a credit grade. The ability-to-repay obligation still applies in full, so income, assets and debts must still be verified from records. The category exists for income that is real but does not fit standard documentation, such as a self-employed borrower qualified on bank deposits.

When it is larger than the conforming loan limit for that county in that year. The Federal Housing Finance Agency publishes a baseline limit each year and a higher ceiling for designated high-cost counties, so the same loan amount can be conforming in one county and jumbo in the next. Crossing the line changes the entire rulebook, because a jumbo is underwritten and priced by the lender or the investor rather than by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

It depends entirely on the programme. Conventional borrower-paid private mortgage insurance may be cancelled on request at 80% of the original value and must be terminated automatically at 78%, under the Homeowners Protection Act, provided payments are current. FHA annual premiums on a thirty-year loan with less than 10% down run for the life of the loan; with 10% or more down they end after eleven years. The USDA annual fee runs for the life of the loan. VA has none.

It is arithmetic rather than an opinion. A point costs 1% of the loan amount and buys a lower rate. Divide what it costs by the amount the lower rate removes from the monthly payment and you have the number of months before it pays back. Keep the loan past that month and it wins; sell or refinance before it and it lost. The figure that decides it is your horizon, and a refinance ends a loan just as finally as a sale does.

Usually property tax and homeowner’s insurance, collected monthly into an escrow account and paid out when they fall due. Often mortgage insurance. Sometimes association dues, which are normally paid separately rather than escrowed. Principal and interest is the only part your note fixes; the others move with tax assessments and insurance renewals, so a payment quoted today is not a payment guaranteed for thirty years. Ask for the itemised version rather than the single number.

We cannot tell you, and any site that gives you a figure is guessing. Closing costs are made of lender fees, third-party fees, title and recording charges, prepaid interest and escrow deposits, and several of those are set by your state, your county and the title company rather than by the lender. The document that answers this properly is your Loan Estimate, which a lender must deliver within three business days of a complete application.

Not always. A refinance restarts the amortisation schedule, so a lower payment spread across a fresh thirty years can cost more in total interest than the loan you left. There are also closing costs, which are real whether you pay them in cash or roll them into the balance. The two questions worth answering are how many months until the costs are paid back by the saving, and whether you will still be holding the loan by then.

Because the rate fixes only the principal and interest portion. Property taxes are reassessed and insurance premiums are renewed, and your servicer recalculates the escrow portion of the payment to match, usually once a year. A shortfall from the previous year is often spread across the next twelve months as well, which is why an increase can look larger than the underlying change. The escrow analysis statement shows the arithmetic; it is worth reading rather than filing.

We will not put a number on it, because nobody can before they have seen a file, an appraisal and a title report. Anyone promising a closing time on a website is promising something they do not yet control. What can be said is what tends to hold a file up: an appraisal that comes in low, a title problem, a gift with no paper trail behind it, and income documents that arrive one at a time over three weeks.

Within three business days of a complete application, and application is defined rather than left to a lender’s judgement: your name, your income, your Social Security number, the property address, an estimate of its value, and the loan amount you are asking for. Once those six exist the clock has started. Before you have the estimate and have said you intend to proceed, a lender may not charge you anything beyond a bona fide credit report fee.

On a refinance, a home equity loan, or a line of credit secured by the home you live in, yes: the Truth in Lending Act gives you three business days after signing in which to rescind, and the money is not disbursed until that period has expired. On a purchase, no. There is no right of rescission on a loan used to buy the home, which is one reason the Closing Disclosure must reach you three business days before you sign.

No. Nothing on this site touches your credit, because nothing on this site talks to a server. The calculators run entirely in your own browser, and the numbers you type live in your address bar so that a link carries them, and nowhere else. There is no account, no submission and no lookup. For the same reason, no result here is an approval, a decline, or evidence of anything except the arithmetic you asked for.

No. There is no application here and no form on the site transmits anything anywhere. Plinth is a design demonstration and is not a lender, so there is nothing to apply to. The contact page composes a message in your own email client and sends nothing by itself. If you are working on a real mortgage, take the questions from these pages to a licensed lender or to a HUD-approved housing counsellor.

Two years of tax returns and W-2 forms, recent pay stubs, two months of statements for every account you would draw the down payment from, and a note of every monthly debt payment with its balance. If any of the money is a gift, a paper trail for it. If you are self-employed, add business returns and a year-to-date profit-and-loss statement. Gathering all of it before the first conversation shortens the process more than anything else you can do.

No. The company, the address, the phone number and the email domain are all invented, and the phone number sits inside the 555-0100 to 555-0199 block reserved for fiction. Plinth is a demonstration of how a full-spectrum mortgage site could be organised, built by a studio called Quarry. The programme rules quoted throughout are real published rules, because getting those wrong would defeat the entire point of the exercise.

Because Plinth is not a lender and holds no such identifier. An NMLS number maps to a real entry in a real federal registry, so printing a plausible-looking one on a demonstration site would either impersonate somebody or invent a registration that does not exist. Neither is acceptable. The same reasoning explains the missing state licence list, the missing star rating, the missing review count and the missing closing-time promise.

Nothing about you. There are no cookies, no analytics, no tags and no third-party scripts, and there is no server to send anything to. If you accept in the storage sheet, your theme, palette and reading preferences are kept in this browser’s local storage so the site looks the same next time. Decline and those keys are cleared and no further ones are written. None of it identifies you, and none of it leaves your device.

No. It implements a good deal deliberately: a three-state theme, four text sizes, a high contrast mode, a reduce-motion setting that genuinely stops the canvas field and the scroll-driven gauge, optional link underlining, a skip link and visible focus rings. But it has not been audited by anybody, and an unaudited claim of conformance is worth nothing at all. The accessibility page lists what is implemented and what has not been verified.