Nobody said any of this.

The affordability page was the first thing that gave me a number I could argue with. It told me the debt ratio was what limited me, not the down payment, and that changed what I did next: I paid off the car instead of saving another five thousand.

We had been told a refinance "pays for itself". The break-even page put a month on it — month 31 — and then showed that the longer term meant more interest overall even though the payment fell. Both things were true at once. That is the bit nobody explains.

The funding fee is the part nobody walks you through. Watching it get added to the balance, and then seeing what that did to the payment, made the trade-off obvious in about fifteen seconds.

I wanted the whole amortization table, not a summary. Month view, year view, a running interest total, and a link I could send to my accountant with the inputs already in it.

An extra hundred a month took nine years off. I had seen that claim before but never as a number of months computed from my own balance.

Rent versus buy with every assumption exposed, including what my down payment would have earned if I had invested it instead. It made the case against buying honestly, and I trusted the rest of the site more because of it.

The learning center article on what actually delays a closing was the only thing I read twice. Nobody else told me that the delay is nearly always a document somebody is sitting on.

I was quoted "one point buys you a quarter". The buy-down page let me put both numbers in and told me it would take nearly six years to get the money back. I kept the cash.