One of the things that we constantly fall back on in mortgage brokering is the cost per thousand (usually written as ‘cpt’ or ‘cost per 000’) sheet. It gives you the actual cost of borrowing €1,000 at a certain interest rate over a certain period.

Banks tend to send out rate sheets which are particular to their specific products, but we also have our own cheat-sheets which cover most of the prices you’ll find (or at least ball park enough to make the difference meaningless).

If you click on the image to the left you’ll get a pdf of our Cost Per 000′ sheet. The way you figure out how much a mortgage might cost you is as follows:

Divide the mortgage amount by 1,000 (to get 1/1000th) and then multiply by the cost you find from going across the rate column and down the term column.

For instance: you want to see how much it will cost per month to borrow €317,000 over 30yrs at 4.25% then its 317×4.92 = €1559 per month. When you are picking through rates looking at the differences in cost rather than just the headline figure is worth doing, keep this sheet if you have an interest in mortgages, it is one of the standard tools of the trade that companies generally don’t give out to their clients.