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I was wondering what the best mortgage interest rate is right now.

Of course there are a lot of variables that you can throw in such as 15 year fixed mortgage, 30 year fixed, 15 year variable interest rate, 30 year adjustable rate mortgage, etc. To make this kind of easy for me, I stuck with a simple 30 year fixed interest rate mortgage.

There are also other variables such as locality, credit score (the better your credit score, the lower your home loan interest rate will be). Once again, to keep this simple, I stuck with an excellent credit rating.

After putting all of this financial information together, I shopped around online for the best interest rate on a home loan with several mortgage lenders. here is what I came up with:

Bank of America 7.159%
CitiMortgage 6.795%
Countrywide 7.239%
Washington Mutual 7.002%
Wells Fargo 6.896%

Of course you still have to keep in mind the fees and points that these lenders charge, but this gives you a pretty good idea about the home loan market right now. All of the prime lenders are near the 7% interest rate mark, with CitiMortgage leading the pack at just under 6.8% and Countrywide charging the most for a home loan at just over 7.2%.

So how much of a difference would this make? Let's say that you chose Countrywide over Citi. How much more would you spend on your mortgage over 30 years because of this? Let's say you borrowed $300,000 for your new house. I plugged that into a mortgage calculator and came up with a difference of over $31,000.

So using today's mortgage interest rates, you could save more than $31,000 over a 30 year period by choosing Citimortgage instead of Countrywide. Who would have thought that a fraction of an interest rate point could have made this much of a difference huh? Now I see why you really need to shop online for the best mortgage interest rate.

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Cajun boy!