My name is Cullen Breedlove, I work for a mortgage company some of you may have heard of, VAMortgageCenter.com. At VAMC a lot of my duties are mortgage and financial related, and I feel I'm able to carry a lot of my knowledge and skills I've developed there over to this mortgage calculator I've developed for you.
Should I win the contest, I forfeit all software and code to MortgageLoanPlace -- I also will be more than happy to continue working on it after it is submitted. I understand there are features some other calculators may have which mine doesn't, or perhaps you don't like my baby blue motif, and anything that comes up I'll be happy to change. Just incase you wanted to put a time on this, I will be your mortgage calculator servant for the next 5 years. Please pick my calculator over the others.
The Mortgage Calculator I've submitted has some rather nice features I'd like to just go over.
Accuracy.For the Interest Rate I'm pulling the national average directly from the government. The PMI uses a formula based off LTV and Mortgage Term to determine monthly cost. Any rounding occuring when figuring out amortization is accounted for on the last payment, just like any other loan you would get from a lender.
Ease of Use.Things are tabbed and placed on the page in the order that is most convenient when thinking about your loan. When entering things into the text boxes I have the type of data I'm looking for highlighted when you are actively on the box and the types of input the box can accept is purely numerical.
Feature Rich.A breakdown is included of their loan based on the information they have entered, I'm also including the numbers should the person wish to pay bi-weekly or pay any discount points. The amortization schedules and graphs are good looking; providing quick glance and detailed information.
Hard Copy.I also provide the option for the user to build a guide that includes all of their information and selected amortization schedules. The guide is branded with Mortgage Loan Place's logo and features and glossary of terms and includes some good tips about thier loan.
Tracking.While not a feature the user can see, I've built a system to track hits to the guide, their last entered calculation, their referring website, and if they've built a guide or not. As part of being on the VAMC team and writing our tracking system over there, I am in a unique position to be able to integrate the tracking from our guide into our other tracking systems.
The Widget Builder was actually a pretty fun little project to build. You can control all the colors from the configuration page below the calculator, double click items on the calculator to remove them, double click them from the removed fields to bring them back, and drag and drop the items around to determine placement.
As far as the actual default values, you can set those as well and also set whether to use the national interest rate, the equation for pmi, or to use percents instead of dollars for certain fields.
On the widget itself, the "$ / year" and "% / month" are clickable to switch back and forth, so if someone knows one value but doesn't want to do the math to do the other, it'll take care of it. The values at the bottom for Monthy, Yearly, and Full Term also update dynamically as the user types.
One other thing that should be unique to only my calculator is the widget tracking I've designed.
We can see what pages the widget is loaded on and who clicks the link to continue on to Mortgage Loan Place.com. That last thing is really important. This is an entirely javascript calculator, I believe Google is giving "link juice" to html links from javascript as opposed to an iframe.
We can also determine who comes from the calculator widget and further track them on MLP with the tracking I've already written for the site -- And because they are including our file remotely, we can make changes to the MLP link at the bottom as we wish if we wanted to give some pages or words a bigger boost than others on the fly.