Calculator results on QuickenLoans.com include taxes and insurance as part of your total monthly payment along with the principle and interest that make up your mortgage payment.

In the past, these taxes and insurance were taken from national averages. Here’s the issue though: If I live in California, my taxes and insurance are very different than if I live in Birmingham, AL.

So, some of the very smart people here at Quicken Loans took it upon themselves to find a better solution. Now, instead of pulling national averages, the Quicken Loans calculator results show taxes and insurances averages for your state. This makes for a much more accurate result and hopefully makes you, the visitor, that much more educated on the entire process.

When we conduct usability tests, one of the most common points of confusion is what’s included in a  monthly mortgage payment result.

Is it taxes?
Is it insurance?
Or both?
Or neither?

Well, we recently revamped the Quicken Loans calculators, and tried to clear up the confusion.

The new calculator results have a simple breakdown that helps you see the difference between your new mortgage portion and your taxes and insurance portion. You’ll still get the total payment too, though. That way you can see the big picture, or its components.

To check out your own situation, feel free to try the calculators yourself, then comment about your experience here.

We had noticed more of our users getting errors on our Quicken Loans website calculators than we thought there should be. So we took a look. Apparently some people use a period when typing a number greater than or equal to one thousand in place of the comma.

Some people were typing: $200,000

Others were typing: $200.000

Truthfully, they mean two different things, but we’re not here to debate whether a comma or period is correct. We just want to know how to best adapt to our visitors and help them along through our site.

So here’s what we told our engineers:

If a visitor types a period or a comma with three trailing zeroes, go ahead and the punctuation and we’ll take the number as is.

But – if a visitor types a comma or decimal with two trailing zeroes, drop the punctuation and the zeroes and we’ll just use the resulting number.

Might sound complicated, but it really makes a lot of sense. This way, whether you use a comma or period to denote the thousands place or the cents on the dollar, either way, we get it. We understand and we’ll do our best to get you results for your calculations.

Just another way we listen to our users and make their visit to our website just a little more pleasant.