By Marie-Claire Smith

Considering your mortgage options in preparation for buying or refinancing your home? The most important thing you will need to consider is that of your monthly payment amount. After all, if you take out a loan whereby your payment is too high, you could end up not being able to swing your payments. This could put you at risk for foreclosure.

Why You Need a Loan with the Right Monthly Payment

The amount you owe each month to your mortgage lender plays a huge role in your monthly finances. A good rule of thumb is that your monthly housing expense (which includes your mortgage, homeowner’s insurance and property tax payments) should not exceed 30% of your monthly income. Any more than that and you could be setting yourself up to fail financially.

Of course, the maximum amount you should be willing to pay will vary depending upon other factors such as the amount of other debt payments (like credit card debt) and the amount you have available to put up as a down payment on the mortgage.

So, start by setting for yourself a maximum monthly mortgage payment you will be able to afford.

The Factors that Determine Your Payment Amount

Next, it is a good idea to understand the various factors that influence how much you pay in mortgage fees each monthly. These are: the principal of the loan amount (P), the annual interest rate of the loan (I), and the loan term (L) in years.

Before you start performing calculations, it is a good idea first to open up a spreadsheet application like Excel and start inputting the various assumptions you want to try. We’ll call each set of assumptions a “scenario.” For example, one scenario might be a loan amount of $125,000, an interest rate of 6.2%, and a repayment term of 30 years. Another might be the same as the first, but with a loan amount of $150,000 (etc.).

Obviously, you can reduce the number of scenarios by setting realistic figures for each item. Four scenarios is probably a good way to start (maybe try two different interest rates and two loan amounts, for example).

Loan Calculator: Knowing the Monthly Payment

So, with all of that in mind, here is how to calculate your future would-be payments using pen & paper or in a spreadsheet application. First, let’s review the variables we discussed above and add a few more (which are simply derivations of the first set).

Variables:

M = monthly payment (this is what you are going to calculate)

P = principal (initial amount borrowed)

L = loan term, in years

I = the annual interest rate (from 1 to 100)

J = monthly interest amount in decimal form, which is calculated: I / (12 x 100)

N = loan term, in months, which is just L x 12

Here is the formula (note that this formula assumes a standard loan wherein interest is compounded each month).

M = P * ( J / (1 – (1 + J) ^ -N)) For this notation, ^ means “to the power of”.

Step by step, here is how to figure out your monthly payment:

1. Calculate 1 + J, then take the result to the power of -N (minus N).

2. Subtract that from 1.

3. Take the inverse of this result (1 / X).

4. Now, multiply the result by J, then by P.

There you have it! Hint: if you use Excel, you can just set this up once and then copy/paste to create as many scenarios as you need. Then, plug in the different assumptions to see how they will affect your payment.

About the Author: Find financial calculators and the best mortgage rates at:

Approve My Home Loan

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Goodnight Sweetheart – One Of The Most Underrated BBC Sitcoms?

by

James Woolley

When people talk about some of the great sitcoms to have been made by the BBC, they often mention series such as Only Fools And Horses, Porridge, The Royle Ramily and The Office, but Goodnight Sweetheart hardly ever gets a mention. Okay so maybe it isn’t up there with some of these great sitcoms, but it is definitely underrated.

Goodnight Sweetheart was shown over six series in the 1990s and yet it’s a sitcom that’s been largely forgotten by British audiences. This seems odd because it was very popular when it was first broadcast, and yet you only find this series repeated occasionally on digital channels such as ITV3. The show starred Nicholas Lyndhurst as an ordinary everyday man living in the 1990s who had one extraordinary ability – he could travel back in time to the 1940s. This sounds a ridiculous premise but when you actually watch the series you really do get drawn into it, and it almost becomes completely believable. The writing by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran is absolutely brilliant and they capture life in war-torn London perfectly. They really bring that era to life and it’s fascinating seeing how the main character, Gary Sparrow, lives two separate lives (with two different girlfriends) in completely different times. It’s not really laugh-out-loud funny but it doesn’t really set out to be. It’s the time-travel element that really adds something extra to this show. There are plenty of funny moments, but for me it’s the brilliant storylines, both in the 1940s and the 1990s, that provide the real entertainment. Plus of course there is the supporting cast who are also superb, particularly Victor McGuire who plays Ron Wheatcroft, Gary’s best mate in the present day. Overall Goodnight Sweetheart is an excellent sitcom and certainly a lot better than some of the recent sitcoms to have been made by the BBC such as My Family and The Green Green Grass. While it may not be the funniest sitcom ever made, it is still a highly enjoyable and very well-written TV series.

Click here to read reviews of some of the most popular comedy DVDs including the

Goodnight Sweetheart DVD box set

and the

Only Fools And Horses DVD box set

.

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Goodnight Sweetheart – One Of The Most Underrated BBC Sitcoms?

Submitted by: Chaz Lamm

WordPress promised to make affiliate internet marketing easier. To a certain degree, it has. Instead of the initial sleek, powerful tools it is morphing into bloat ware with many plugins, themes, and options. To promote affiliate product review articles and build my affiliate internet marketing venture, I was compelled to convert to Affiliate Genie.

And I’m glad I did.

For some time, Chris Rempel has devoted his efforts to turning affiliate marketing away from a crap shoot into a science. His process in a nutshell is this:

* identify key phrases in niche markets that appeal to desperate customers who are prepared to buy* post reviews for the affiliate products that satisfy those buyers’ wants

use natural search engine optimization(SEO) to list high in the search engine results pages(SERPs)

* get those desperate eyeballs on your review when those buyers have their plastic cards in hand* help the customer fix the problem

CR’s primary concept is that you don’t want your website to show up early in the purchasing cycle when people are gathering knowledge, but instead, at the last part of the cycle when they are determining which widget is suitable for them.

A Dozen Good Reasons to Slap WordPress and Shift All your Affiliate Marketing to Affiliate Genie.

1. Keeps your eye on the prize. Affiliate Genie has everything you’ll want to structure an excellent product review or basic article- and nothing extra. All of the elements you require such as title, affiliate link, product description, product research, star rating system, keywords, and page description are within the fill in template. You are not able to save a review if any of the elements are missing.

2. Disclaimers built into the template. The Federal Trade Commission has new rules regarding what an affiliate marketer or blogger must perform to avoid fines and other civil penalties. Lite versions are incorporated along with pages where you can post your personal, extensive privacy policy and legal disclaimers.

3. Build your pages right on the site. No FTP necessary, except to upload the files to your domain or subdomain.

4. TinyMCE. Easy to create pages using popular TinyMCE(Tiny Moxiecode Content Editor- platform- independent web- based JavaScript/HTML WYSIWYG editor) .

5. Active ability of PHP without the risks of MySQL. No database to corrupt.

6. A single click backup. Affiliate Genie permits you to back up your entire website with one click. AG creates a zip file that you can download to any computer.

7. Mobility. If you need to move a web site, take your backup, unzip it, then upload to your new domain. You are able to move a large site in under 5 minutes, including backups. This is especially convenient if someone purchases your domain.

8. Promo Link. At the top part of each web page, you’ve got the option of including a special promo. Should you find a new affiliate program, you change one file, and you are now promoting a sizzling product across ALL of your web pages without having to edit the template.

9. Social Media. Built into the system are 20 plus social bookmarking and social networking links to make promotion a snap.

10. Stable. WordPress is frequently being updated. New functions are added that may render your favorite plugins useless. AG is based on solid HTML that functions everywhere.

11. Function over beauty. Even though you can alter the native CSS files to change colors and fonts, you don’t have to. No one uses the default WP theme anymore, unless they’re totally lazy. Don’t waste your time developing or hunting down a fresh theme. Web pages load faster without all of the add- ons.

12. No distractions. The whole purpose of an online business website is making money. Find a niche community of buyers. Offer them the answer to their problems at the right time. Let someone else give them the bells and whistles.

If you have experience never making money with your WordPress blogs, you owe it to yourself to test Affiliate Genie for yourself. You can kick yourself later.

About the Author: Charles Lamm – retired attorney, junkyard philosopher, amateur anarchist – now chooses to make his living on the Internet from wherever he happens to be. For more on Affiliate Genie and other Internet marketing tools, visit his website at:

ChazL.com

– http: //www.

chazl.com

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