Annual Cap

  

Gettin' a mortgage? Great. You have two basic flavors. You can pay based on a fixed interest rate or you can pay based on an adjustable interest rate.

A fixed-rate mortgage provides you the same interest rate for the life of the mortgage. It is set at the time the loan is signed and stays the same for however long the mortgage is set to run for (typically 15 or 30 years).

For an adjustable-rate deal, the interest rate for the loan fluctuates along with overall interest rates as pegged to some standard like LIBOR as in..."the cost of your adjustable loan will be LIBOR plus 200 basis points, adjusted every quarter". So the interest shifts based on market conditions and based on the terms of the contract.

The fixed-rate option provides security, allowing the borrower to know what their payments will be...forever. The payments stay the same, no matter what happens in the interest rate market.

Meanwhile, a borrower with an adjustable-rate mortgage can see their payments change as interest rates move around. Getting this kind of mortgage is a type of gamble: the borrower is hoping that rates will go down and stay down, allowing them to pay less on the mortgage than if they had locked in a higher rate.

Many adjustable-rate mortgages have limits to the amount the rate can move around. These limits are called the "annual cap."

So say you get an adjustable-rate mortgage that starts off with a 5% interest rate and has a annual cap of two percentage points. In the first year, the bond market goes bonkers and overall interest rates spike by three percentage points. Theoretically, your mortgage rate should jump to 8%, but since you have the annual cap in place, it will only rise to 7%.

Caps come with strings attached: First, the cap also applies to the amount the interest rate can decline as well. If interest rates plunge, your rate might not drop as much, if you have a cap in place.

Second, some of these cap structures can get complicated.

For instance, mortgage lender Freddie Mac outlines a "7/1 ARM with a 5/2/5 cap structure." ARM just means "adjustable rate mortgage." The "7/1" part indicates that your interest rate will remain steady for the first seven years, with the first adjustment set to take place in the eighth year. Adjustments will then continue on an annual basis after that.

The cap structure numbers - "5/2/5" - indicate that in that first adjustment in Year 8, the interest rate can move by 5 percentage points off the initial rate. It can then move by two percentage points per year in each subsequent year (that's the number two in the 5/2/5 set up). However, the rate can never move by more than five percentage points over the life of the mortgage (that's the last five there).

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What is Adjustable-Rate Mortgag...17 Views

00:00

Finance allah shmoop What is adjustable rate mortgage or arm

00:08

Well here's an arm and here's a leg and that's

00:11

What Renting the money to buy a home costs you

00:14

Yeah Okay Eight r m stands for adjustable rate mortgage

00:17

The rate well that's The interest cost of the money

00:20

or the cost of renting that money to buy the

00:23

home Well the rate isn't it fixed in this case

00:26

like five point seven percent for thirty years Where you

00:28

know in advance that your monthly payments going to be

00:31

nine hundred forty three bucks a month or whatever it

00:33

is that would be a fixed mortgage a fixed number

00:37

You can count on it for all three hundred sixty

00:40

payments And then the house is all yours So that's

00:43

fixed then what's adjustable like yes the interest rate changes

00:47

But how does it change Well in a standard arm

00:50

there is some global standard on which the rates are

00:53

often price like lie bore the london interbank borrowing offering

00:57

rate It's one of the key things that price is

00:59

the cost of renting money all around the world with

01:02

the actual rate of libel or is generally reserved for

01:04

banks like super cheap cost of renting money to banks

01:08

who are very likely to pay back the money with

01:11

no hassle that rate is more or less what banks

01:14

pay for running the money along with blue chip customers

01:16

in real life The banks then mark up a premium

01:19

on top of the rate that they're paying to rent

01:22

the money to themselves And then they resell or re

01:26

rent that money teo their prized customers So the pricing

01:30

of bank my views in renting money to joe six

01:33

pack could be something like lie boer plus three percent

01:37

or three hundred basis points So if libel or is

01:40

it didn't say two and a half percent today the

01:43

adjustable rate might be five and a half percent and

01:46

all that's great honor given alone It might mean that

01:48

for a while you're paying seven hundred twelve dollars a

01:51

month for your house payment wonderfully cheap and in fact

01:54

banks market these low rates initially to help people be

01:58

able to afford tto by that new home and live

02:00

of the dream You know the american dream usually with

02:03

an arm there's a teaser rate that starts really low

02:07

Like at live or live or plus ten basis points

02:11

or something like ridiculously cheap for six months or a

02:14

year something like that Then it has an incremental set

02:17

of step ups in interest costs and venit adjust with

02:21

the markets usually upward maybe upward by a lot Remember

02:26

there's a reason it's called a teaser rate but then

02:29

if we get inflation or a you know just bank

02:32

nervousness for there are weird effects from brexit or the

02:35

volume of transactions going through london or something weird happens

02:39

Well then the liquidity drops and interest rates rise So

02:44

now lie board goes up and up and up to

02:46

four and a half percent and wealth contractually in your

02:50

mortgage paperwork you have to pay live or plus three

02:53

hundred basis points no matter what So now that's seven

02:56

and a half percent interest on the dough you borrowed

03:00

and well we're that toe happen It's likely that your

03:02

monthly payment has skyrocketed from seven hundred twelve dollars a

03:06

month is something more like twelve hundred dollars a month

03:09

or more Can you handle that big of a payment

03:11

Well have you done a fixed rate loan at nine

03:13

Hundred forty three dollars a month Well you'd still be

03:15

paying on that number but you rolled the dice with

03:18

an arm and now you owe big bills There go

03:22

that arm and a leg thing we warned you about 00:03:26.033 --> [endTime] eh

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