Early in one's financial life the tasks of establishing a monthly budget and balancing the checkbook are the first encountered and the first mastered – either that or one marries someone who can master those tasks. The key is that the essential parts of managing one's money are learned and the checking and savings accounts begin to grow. At a certain point, if all goes well, the time comes when a person or family is financially secure enough to buy a house.

This brings along a whole new set of financial obligations and tasks to be accomplished. These are more complex and more important because your credit rating and standing in the wide world of financial profiling is at stake. Unless someone is a real estate agent, understanding the world of escrow, earnest money, and Fannie Mae could be a lot easier with a little help.

Pricing Real Estate

Mortgage and real estate software can be that helping hand. Aside from computing the rate of return for stock and bond investments, there probably are fewer personal finance decisions more complicated than buying or selling a house. Signing a mortgage that is only a few dollars different than another offer could mean thousands of dollars lost over the life of the loan, and figuring out amortization, depreciation, and balloon payments can be difficult even for a professional.

In addition to computing monthly payments and the best rate or term for the loan, mortgage software also can help with tips to pay off the loan sooner, thus saving the homebuyer more on accrued interest. These packages can be bought for a little as $5 on some online discount or auction sites, but do not expect much for the money. While the software will claim to be able to compute payments and interest, its features likely will be very limited.

Mortgage Software Features

For example, one package will compute monthly interest and payments but has no feature for breaking that down into bi-weekly payments. The software user also will be out of luck if they live in Canada and the software only works with United States dollars and only takes into account lending restrictions of one country.

The general advice for someone looking for software applies here – check the features offered and pick the software that contains the features most likely to be needed. The popular financial planning software suites will have mortgage calculation features that can help a homeowner track the life of a loan, but $40 to $60 will buy a specialized real estate package that can be of help before, during, and after the purchase.