Mortgage estimators

I've seen all of these online mortgage estimators - ie. put in how much you make, your monthly expenses, etc and it tells you for about how much of a mortgage you would qualify for.

Needless to say, the number that pops out worries me; are these things accurate or do they give you the low end of the deal?

Re: Mortgage estimators

My personal experience (from using the calculators often and now recently actually speaking to the mortgage broker) is that when you do the calculator where you figure out what your payment would be (inserting the interest rate, amount of the loan, term), the payment is pretty accurate.

However, when you do the calculator where you estimate how much you can qualify for based on your income, the calculator provides a low end number. This is because banks lately seem to lend more than they should or have in the past - up to 40% of your income! This astounds me.