My husband and I have recently bought our first home. Initially, the journey towards our dream felt very overwhelming, mainly due to the need for fairly extensive research of both the property & finance markets in Sydney. One of the first steps we'd recommend to anybody looking to buy their first home in Australia is to find a comprehensive mortgage calculator. Mortgage calculators are generally available on most finance providers? websites.

The mortgage calculator gives you an idea on your maximum borrowing capacity, which will determine the property price range you should look for. Amongst other handy hints, the mortgage calculator also gives you a rough idea on the total interest you're likely to pay during the life of the loan and the result is a great motivator to make as many additional repayments into the loan as possible. If you feel you will have the capacity to increase your minimum repayment rather than making irregular payments into the loan, the mortgage calculator will work out the reduced loan term based on what you can pay into the loan. The mortgage calculator will also respectively show you an approximate amount of interest you'll save by making additional repayments, which is another great motivator to pay your loan off as fast as possible.

A comprehensive mortgage calculator also gives you an option to choose between Interest Only and Principal & Interest repayments. Most lenders offer interest only periods for up to 10 years and let the loan revert to a Principal & Interest for the remaining term of the loan.

The mortgage calculator should really be anybody's starting point before investing their time into property and finance research. If you don't know your maximum borrowing capacity you can't narrow your research down to your price range.

As the mortgage calculator is readily available on most lenders? websites, you can always return to the your favourite mortgage calculator once you've short listed two or three lenders you're considering for your home loan. The mortgage calculator lets you compare any two home loans at the time as they're most likely to have different interest rates, which may have a great impact on the total interest charged to your loan over the entire loan term. A comprehensive mortgage calculator is always designed by the industry professionals based on the latest average living expenses for the number of applicants and their dependants as set by independent and professional research organisations.

The mortgage calculator generally provides a fairly reasonable and trustworthy result based on the information entered into the relevant fields.