It seems that every financial institution that offers a mortgage on a property and has a website also offers the services of their own mortgage calculator for the convenience and ease of prospective borrowers. It’s just too easy! Write the words mortgage into your search engine and hit they enter key. You will get a long list of financial institutions offering home loans and mortgages. The very first item on the website will be the mortgage calculator. And don’t be nervous - it’s easy to use. You have to enter three basic items of information and then the mortgage calculator will do the rest for you. Look at the calculator: it asks for the amount of the mortgage you are thinking about. Let’s say for this example that it is $100,000. Enter that amount. Then it asks for the period of the mortgage, let’s say again as an example that the period is for 30 years. Enter 30 in the required space. Finally it asks for the interest rate of the mortgage. Let’s say that mortgages are currently running at 7 percent. Enter a 7 where it asks for the rate. Now all that’s left to do is click on the word ‘calculate’ and the computer takes over from you. The answer you will get from your mortgage calculator is $665.30 per month. The mortgage calculator has done all the work for you, including doing the extra calculation tin order to give you the answer in monthly payments. Some of the mortgage calculators on the various websites offer additional calculations such as extra payments and other websites offer a selection of calculators, all to with finances, mortgages etc. It wasn’t always like this. In the good old days before the advent of home computers and even electronic calculators, the mortgage calculator was clerk who sat with a pen and paper and made the calculations by hand. Later, after mechanical and then electronic calculators appeared in offices, the calculation of a mortgage became much simpler and very much faster. Now with the convenience of computers for everyone, a mortgage calculator is a commonly used item. No longer does one have to go downtown, find a mortgage bank, sit in from of the clerk or agent and let them work out all the details of your mortgage for you. It’s a ten second task that anyone can do!