If you are a programmer, a creative programmer, I have a good news for you. Mortgage Loan Place is having a programming contest – The “Super Sexy” Mortgage Calculator Contest. You can have a chance to win $10,000 of extra pocket money by developing a mortgage calculator. The winner’s calculator will become the centerpiece of the tools section on Mortgage Loan Place.
What you need to do in this contest is to develop the best mortgage calculator on the Internet creatively. Your mortgage calculator should contain a minimum amount of functionality like taking the principal, interest, taxes and insurance as the main inputs and showing the monthly payment as the output. You can write your program in PHP, Java (I think they mean the Java language used in Javascript) and Ajax. The basic requirements are pretty simple to implement. To stand out in this contest, your program must be bug-free and you should also add in more features and functions especially on the presentation layer (on what kind of data you are going to present and how you present it).
I had developed a mortgage calculator but I think my program (a Java Applet) is too simple and it is not qualfied to enter the contest because it only helps in finding the mortgage monthly payment. Am I going to enter the contest? I think I don’t have the time for now as I still have a lot of programming works on hand. Well I do have some ideas and I don’t mind to share with you here.
If I’m the user of the calculator, what kind features will I look? Other than showing the mortgage payment, I think the calculator should be able:
- to generate a table that shows different mortgage payments at different rates for the terms (and export it to an Excel file).
- to generate a table or graph that shows the total money I will need pay for the loan after the loan term (and export it to an Excel file).
- to reverse some calculations. For example, to calculate the loan term if I’m able to pay $X of mortgage payment each month with Y% of interest rate and the principal of $Y (and also generate a table for the output, for example: loan term versus $X-20%, $X-10%, $X, $X+10% and $X+20).
If you are not really sure how to calculate the mortgage payments or you want to add more features to your mortgage calculator, here are some useful materials from Mortgage Loan Place for your reference:
- A sample of simple mortgage calculator (Excel)
- How amortization, taxes, and PMI are calculated (PDF)
- Required and suggested features (PDF)
- http://www.mortgagecalculator.org
- http://www.drcalculator.com/mortgage/
- http://www.mlcalc.com
Video About The “Super Sexy” Mortgage Calculator Contest
The challenge runs from June 15th to July 31st, 2009. So hurry up and submit your very own, sexiest calculator!
Read more about Mortgage Calculator Contest.
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