Online Mortgage

The internet can be an excellent resource for comparing mortgage offers. There are a number of potential pitfalls with online mortgage sites that many homeowners overlook completely when refinancing their mortgage loans. Here are several tips to help you avoid costly mistakes when refinancing your mortgage online.

The problem most homeowners have when refinancing their mortgage loans online is that they neglect to read before they click. By entering your personal information and clicking submit you are consenting to everything from selling your personal information to paying fees as high as $1,300 just for filling out a form. How can you avoid being taken advantage of when refinancing your mortgage online?

The answer is simple; read before you click. Every mortgage site that you should consider using to refinance will have a license and disclosure statement somewhere at the bottom. Just because a site has this statement doesn’t automatically mean that it’s safe to use, you have to read the disclosure first. One popular mortgage site that promises on television to get mortgage lenders competing for your loan has a fee of $1,300 buried deep in their disclosure statement. What is this absurd mortgage garbage fee?


This “Computerized Loan Origination” fee is paid to so-called mortgage websites that generate leads. These sites have absolutely nothing to do with mortgage loans aside from their large advertising budgets and catchy slogans. They exist only to collect your personal information and sell it to mortgage lenders and brokers. The problem with this Computerized Loan Origination fee paid to the popular “lending” site above is that this fee appears on your Good Faith Estimate. If you refinance your mortgage with one of the lenders in their “network” you’ll have to pay as much as $1,300 for their part in arranging your loan.

What do these mortgage sites do to “arrange” your mortgage? Nothing that you can’t do for yourself simply by shopping around. You can learn more about refinancing your mortgage online while avoiding costly mistakes with a free mortgage tutorial.