Michael Johnson

Mortgages, loans and household borrowing · Berekening.be

Mortgages
Loans
Insurance
Property costs

Michael has spent close to twenty years around lending — first assessing mortgage applications, later training brokers on how affordability is actually worked out rather than how it is advertised. That background shapes what he writes here: the arithmetic on a repayment schedule is simple, and almost every surprise a borrower meets comes from a fee, a rounding rule or a rate that resets on a date nobody pointed at.

He looks after the mortgage, loan and insurance calculators, and reviews anything that quotes an interest rate. His rule for a worked example is that it has to survive being checked against a real lender's statement — if a figure only holds because the example ignores the arrangement fee, the example is wrong and the page gets rewritten.

He is most interested in the questions people are too embarrassed to ask: what overpaying actually saves, why the balance barely moves in the early years, and when refinancing costs more than it returns.

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