The Best Mortgage Apps For Paying Off Your Balance

A mortgage is usually the biggest line item in a person’ monthly budget and as daunting as the full balance can be it is still worth chipping away at it to lower the total amount paid over time. Even though it can seem so inconsequential to only throw a little bit here and there at the mammoth number, it can make a tremendous difference. It just won’t feel like it until about twenty years down the line. That’s where it is helpful to have one of these mortgage payoff calculators that will show you how many months (or years?) you’ll be trimming off the end of the mortgage each time you pay more than the regular amount, plus how much less you will pay in interest. Unlike the many dozens of mortgage estimation calculators that tell you how much your monthly payment will be, these all offer a way to ‘play’ with different scenarios to see how much of an impact just a few dollars here and there every month could make.

For those who are about to buy a house these can still come in handy in addition to the estimation apps by letting you predict how long it will take you to gain the amount of equity you are aiming for (whether it is 100% or just enough to make a profit when you’re going to move in a few years). Expecting a raise next year? Or daycare costs to go away? Enter in the extra payments you expect to start making in the future and watch what happens to your balance. Besides, it looks like buyers markets are going to take hold across the country (here’s a list of where they’re happening first) so you could be in a position to buy a house sooner than you think. If you’re looking for where things are heating up faster than anywhere else, check out the hottest real estate markets of this spring.

Know of an app to add to the list? Email me: [email protected] or tweet me @amydobsonRE.

U.S. Mortgage Calculator You can add multiple extra payment scenarios, either as one-time or recurring payments, to get a sense of how much faster you will pay down the loan. Users can input line items as either a dollar amount or a percentage of the home’s value (such as Private Mortgage Insurance or homeowners insurance). If you don’t know the exact amount it provides the averages for the U.S. as the default so you can still get an estimate of your total costs.

• iOS, Android
• Price: Free
• Link: iTunes; Google Play; Web browser: https://usmortgagecalculator.org/

Loan Calculator Pro This app allows you to calculate the impact of variable extra payments over the long term life of the loan. If you know you’re getting a bonus around the time of the 12th payment and you want to see what happens if you applied your bonus every year you can input an estimated bonus amount for every 12th payment to see how much that will change your payoff date and total interest. It doesn’t have to be on a set schedule, you can input variable amounts for any month during the loan.

Karl’s Mortgage Calculator Besides allowing you to play around with extra payments lets you reverse calculate the principal, interest amount, or loan length if you provide two out of the three pieces of information so you can create different scenarios based on the cost of the house. Also has a nice summary page which tells you everything at once–term reduction, savings, total interest etc. all in one place. Multiple currencies supported.

Mortgage Payoff Track This one lets you import CSV files if you have been using a spreadsheet until now. It has an easy prediction page where you can play around with putting in an extra payment or changing the interest rate to see what would happen to your payoff amount and/or date. For those who like to both pie charts and line graphs this app uses both.

Easy Mortgage Calculator For those who want something simple and easy this calculator gives you the basic functions as all the others. Add in your property cost, interest rate, the term of the loan and it tells you the total interest, total amount paid, monthly payment and price per square foot. Then you can add in one extra payment at a time to see what it does to the balance.

Mortgage Home Loan Payment Calculator This one has an extra line item where you can add in miscellaneous expenses so you can account for repairs and upkeep. There’s also a reverse calculation option where you put in all the numbers except house price and it calculates the price you can afford based on the parameters you defined.

Mortgage Offers an early payment option like the others, but has more options for timing of payments such as daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, bi-annual or yearly. It also adds in a line item for inflation.

• iOS
• Price: $1.99

Debinator While not strictly a mortgage app, it has all the functionality you would need to manage a mortgage balance. Once you’ve added your income, expenses and debt this app figures out how much extra money you have to send to debt each month and tells you an amount, rather than you having to rely on estimation. It has a neat ‘play with your money’ feature where you can see what happens to your mortgage trajectory if you hypothetically spend less on other parts of your budget.

•  iOS
• Price: $19.99

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This post first appeared on Forbes.com. To see the original, click here.