Calculator from Mortgage Book I read

I was visiting the St Louis County Library headquarters on Lindbergh last weekend thumbing through their most recent non-fiction books when I found "The New Rule for Mortgages" by Dale Robyn Siegel. Being the number geek that I am, I quickly found a chart in the book that shows how much lenders adjust interest rates based on your FICO credit score and loan to value (LTV) ratio. I quickly thought "that looks like a cool online calculator to me!" So I checked out the book, even after my wife gave me a weird look for checking out yet another bizarre non-fiction selection. I have now coded it up in PHP as usual and now it is living on my financial calculators page as my latest fun web calculator for the masses. The calculator is only useful for folks with FICO scores of 620 and higher, and shows your principal and interest payment both before and after the rate has been adjusted. The book also explains a lot of how the mortgage industry has changed and how everything works now since the crash of the lending industry back in 2008. It would be good reading for anyone looking to purchase a new home, sell their home, or refinance in today's changed mortgage market. Luckily we have already refinanced last year after selling our house, and we do not plan on refinancing again any time soon. In any case I thought it was a very interesting read, but then again, I may not be your typical library patron!

One thing that has been annoying me of late are these persistent cell phone calls from "John Taylor" wanting me to return their call at some 866 number. First off, nobody knows my cell phone number, which I have only had for about a year, except my immediate family and a few select people at work (it is not on my HR records or anything.) With a few Google searches it sounds like these John Taylor calls are quite prevalent and are from some collection agency trying to track down people to receive unpaid payments from them. Perhaps at some time someone with my cell phone number had a bad debt that needs repaid, but it sure is not me! I will just continue to ignore the calls since I cannot figure out how to block calls on my cheapo Virgin Mobile phone that was a hand me down from my 12 year old son.

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