Disclosures
The page a lending site should write first.
Everything that a mortgage website would normally imply, and this one cannot: a licence, a rate, an approval, a closing date, a customer. Each of them is named below, with the reason it is absent, and every figure the site does print is itemised as either a published rule or an illustrative assumption.
Plinth Home Lending · a design demonstration by Quarry
Plinth is not a lender
Plinth Home Lending does not exist. It does not lend, broker, originate, fund, purchase, service or insure a mortgage, and it does not arrange for anybody else to. The company name, the address, the telephone number, the email domain and any person named anywhere on the site are invented. The telephone number sits inside the 555-0100 to 555-0199 block reserved for fiction, so that it cannot ring a real household or business.
What is real is the programme rules. Those were taken from the agencies that publish them and stated as carefully as we could manage, because a demonstration that got the rules wrong would be worthless and, on this subject, harmful.
No licence, and no NMLS identifier
There is no NMLS identifier on this site. There is no state licence list, no approved-states map, no company registration number and no named loan originator. Plinth holds none of those things, because it is not a lender.
They are also missing for a second reason, which matters more. An NMLS identifier is not decoration. It maps to a real entry in the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System, which consumers use to check whether the person in front of them is licensed and what their record is. Printing a plausible-looking number on a demonstration site would either point at somebody who exists and has nothing to do with this, or teach a visitor that the number is the kind of thing a designer fills in. Both are worse than an empty space.
If you are looking at any lending website, that number is the thing to check first. Look the company and the individual up in the registry directly rather than trusting what is printed in the footer.
No rate, payment or timeline here is an offer
Nothing on this site is an offer of credit, an invitation to apply, a pre-qualification, a pre-approval, a rate lock or a commitment to lend. No figure on any page has been underwritten, because no file has been reviewed and no credit has been pulled.
The site publishes no interest rates and no annual percentage rates at all. Every calculator asks you to type a rate in, and the rate you type is an assumption you are testing rather than a price anybody is offering. Nothing here is a promise about eligibility, pricing, terms, costs or timing.
Equal Housing Opportunity
Equal Housing Opportunity. Housing and mortgage lending in the United States are subject to federal fair-housing and fair-lending law. This site is a demonstration and does not lend, but it is built to sit inside those rules rather than beside them.
Fair lending, stated as law
What follows is a description of the law, not a promise by Plinth. Plinth makes no promises about its lending conduct because it has none. A real lender is bound by these statutes whether or not it chooses to put them on a page.
- The Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibits discrimination in any aspect of a credit transaction on the basis of race, colour, religion, national origin, sex, marital status or age, because all or part of an applicant’s income comes from a public assistance programme, or because an applicant has in good faith exercised a right under the Consumer Credit Protection Act.
- The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in residential real-estate-related transactions, including the making and purchasing of loans, because of race, colour, religion, sex, disability, familial status or national origin.
- Both statutes are interpreted and enforced by federal agencies, and those interpretations develop over time. The agencies, not a demonstration site, are the authority on their current scope.
No claim of accessibility conformance
This site does not claim conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines at any level, because it has not been audited by anybody. A conformance claim is a statement about the result of testing, and no testing of that kind has been done here.
A great deal is implemented deliberately, and theaccessibility page lists exactly what, together with the list of what has not been verified. A badge would have been easier to put in the footer and would have meant nothing.
Every figure on this site, itemised
The distinction that matters on a lending site is between a rule somebody published and a number somebody assumed. This table draws it for every category of figure on these pages. The label is written out in each row, so it never depends on a colour.
| The figure | What it is | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| The FHA upfront mortgage insurance premium, 1.75% of the base loan amount | Published rule | Published by FHA, within the Department of Housing and Urban Development |
| FHA annual mortgage insurance duration: the life of the loan below 10% down on a thirty-year term, eleven years at 10% or more | Published rule | Published by FHA |
| FHA minimum down payment: 3.5% at a credit score of 580 or above, 10% between 500 and 579 | Published rule | Published by FHA. Individual lenders commonly set higher thresholds of their own |
| Conventional PMI cancellation on request at 80% of original value, automatic termination at 78%, and termination at the midpoint of the amortisation period | Published rule | The Homeowners Protection Act |
| Conventional minimum down payment: 3% on certain low-down-payment products, 5% on most other conventional loans | Published rule | Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac eligibility rules |
| Conventional cash-out refinances generally limited to 80% of the value of the home | Published rule | Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac eligibility rules |
| The USDA upfront guarantee fee, currently 1% of the loan amount, and the annual fee, currently 0.35% of the average scheduled balance | Published rule, reset annually | Set by USDA each fiscal year. Described as current, never as permanent |
| The USDA household income ceiling at 115% of the area median income, and the eligibility map | Published rule | Published by USDA, by county and household size |
| VA: no monthly mortgage insurance, a one-time funding fee that varies with the down payment and with prior use, and the waivers for service-connected disability and certain surviving spouses | Published rule | Published by the Department of Veterans Affairs. The site describes the fee tiers rather than printing them |
| The Loan Estimate within three business days of a complete application, and the six-item definition of an application | Published rule | Regulation Z, the mortgage disclosure rules |
| The Closing Disclosure at least three business days before consummation, and the three changes that restart the waiting period | Published rule | Regulation Z |
| The three-business-day right of rescission on a refinance of a principal residence, and its absence on a purchase | Published rule | The Truth in Lending Act |
| The Qualified Mortgage definition and the ability-to-repay rule | Published rule | The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau |
| The conforming loan limit that separates a conventional loan from a jumbo | Published rule, reset annually | Published by the Federal Housing Finance Agency each year. The site describes the mechanism and prints no number |
| FHA county loan limits, with a national floor and a national ceiling | Published rule, reset annually | Published by FHA each year. The site describes the mechanism and prints no number |
| A credit score around 620 as the usual conventional starting point | Industry convention | A lender convention rather than a published rule, and labelled as one wherever it appears |
| Every default value a calculator starts with: loan amount, term, interest rate, property tax rate, insurance, association dues, mortgage insurance rate, appreciation, rent growth, maintenance, investment return and selling costs | Illustrative assumption | Chosen so a page is useful before you type anything. Not an estimate of your situation |
| Every payment, total, balance, break-even month, schedule row and chart a calculator produces | Illustrative assumption | Arithmetic performed on the assumptions you supplied, in your own browser |
| The $300,000 loan and the monthly savings used in the article on discount points | Illustrative assumption | Labelled illustrative in the paragraph immediately above the table |
| Interest rates and annual percentage rates | Not on this site | This site publishes none. Every calculator asks you to supply one |
| Approval odds, decision times and closing times | Not on this site | Nobody can give one before seeing a file, an appraisal and a title report |
| Reviews, star ratings, testimonials, awards, years in business and lending volume | Not on this site | The demonstration has no customers, so it has none of these |
| Named lender, investor, insurer or technology partners | Not on this site | No real institution has anything to do with this site |
| An NMLS identifier, a state licence list, or a licensed loan originator’s name | Not on this site | Plinth is not a lender and holds none. Inventing one would map to a real federal registry |
Where a figure is reset annually, the site describes the mechanism and does not print the number. A stale figure on a lending site is worse than no figure, because it looks like knowledge.
What is deliberately missing
- A rate. A rate you have not been underwritten for is a guess with a decimal point in it.
- Star ratings and review counts. The demonstration has no customers, so it has no reviews, and inventing them would be the least forgivable thing a lending site could do.
- A closing-time promise. Nobody can make one before they have seen the file, the appraisal and the title report.
- Approval odds. There is no underwriting here, so there is nothing to base one on.
- Lender logos as partners. No real institution has any connection to this site.
- A countdown, a rate alert or an urgency banner. Nothing on this site changes what you see except the controls you operate yourself.
If you believe a lender has discriminated
Complaints about housing discrimination are taken by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Complaints about consumer financial products, including mortgages, are taken by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. State regulators and state attorneys general take them too, and many states have their own fair housing agency.
Those bodies are named here without links on purpose. Search for them yourself rather than following a link out of a demonstration site, which is good practice generally and especially in this corner of the internet.
Contact
Questions about this page can go to hello@plinthlending.example or (816) 555-0147. Both are invented, both are here because a real site would carry them, and neither will reach anybody.
Plinth Home Lending is a design demonstration. The company, the address, the phone number and the email domain are invented. No licence, NMLS identifier, rate, approval or timeline on this site is real, and no form on it transmits or stores anything.