Loan Project: Buying a House

Loan Project: Buying a House
For this assignment, you will analyze a home mortgage loan.
1. Find a description, asking price, and real estate taxes of a house for sale, and decide on a purchase price you would be willing to pay (assuming you have the means). Find a current market interest rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage having a down payment of 20 percent of the purchase price.
2. Compute the down payment, amount financed, and the monthly mortgage payment (showing how to use the appropriate financial formula).
3. Compute the monthly amount of real estate taxes and add to the monthly mortgage payment to get the total monthly amount paid.
4. Suppose that in order to qualify for the loan, the total monthly amount paid cannot exceed 30 percent of monthly income. What is the minimum monthly income needed to qualify for the loan? What is the minimum annual income needed? (Note: This is a simplified minimum income requirement calculation, for the purposes of this project, as it does not take into account other costs such as insurance or other loans or assets currently held.)
5. Construct an amortization table (using spreadsheet software or online resources such as http://www.bankrate.com).
6. Assume that the first payment is made in January of the current year. Find the month and year of the last payment. Find the date of the first month when the amount applied to the principal exceeds the amount of interest paid. How many of the 360 payments have been made at this point?
7. Assuming that the mortgage is held for the full 30 years, compute the total principal paid and the total interest paid.
Your report must include
• name of project and your name
• house’s description, asking price, and real estate taxes, the purchase price, and the current market interest rate (include references)
• computations and answers for tasks 2, 3, and 4, amortization table for task 5, answers for task 6, and computations and answers for task 7
• conclusion (a paragraph summary describing the results you found to be particularly interesting, and why)
Additional details and discussion will be provided in WebTycho conferences.

Statistics Project
For this assignment, you will implement a project involving statistical procedures. The topic may be something that is related to your work, a hobby, or something you found interesting. If you choose, you may use the example described below.
The project report must include
• name of project and your name
• purpose of project
• data (provide the raw data used, and cite the source)—the sample size must be at least 10
• median, sample mean, range, sample variance, and sample standard deviation (show work)
• frequency distribution
• histogram
• percentage of data within one standard deviation of the mean, percentage of data within two standard deviations of the mean, percentage of data within three standard deviations of the mean (include explanation and interpretation — do your percentages imply that the histogram is approximately bell-shaped?)
• conclusion (several paragraphs interpreting your statistics and graphs; relate to the purpose of the project)
If you choose, you may use the following example for your data.
• Purpose: Compare the amount of sugar in a standard serving size of different brands of cereal. (You may instead choose to compare the amount of fat, protein, salt, or any other category in cereal or some other food.)
• Procedure: Go to the grocery store (or your pantry) and pick at least 10 different brands of cereal. (Instead of choosing a random sample, you might purposely pick from both the “healthy” cereal types and the “sugary” ones.)
From the cereal box, record the suggested serving size and the amount of sugar per serving. The raw data is the serving size and amount of sugar per serving for each of the 10 boxes of cereal. Before calculating the statistics on the amount of sugar in each cereal, be sure you are comparing the same serving size.
If you use a serving size of 50 grams, you must calculate how much sugar is in 50 grams of each cereal. For example, if the box states that there are 9 grams of sugar in 43 grams of cereal, there would be 50 times 9 divided by 43, or 10.5 grams in 50 grams of cereal. The result of this simple calculation (for each of 10 boxes) is the data you will use in the project statistics and charts.