Are online mortgage lenders as good as local brick-and-mortar ones?
I had a pretty good experience with Lending Tree, although they are a mortgage broker, not a lender themselves. At least five of my co-workers are currently re-financing through Amerisave.  Four have had a wonderful experience.  The fifth has been dealing with a representative who constantly misunderstands him, asks for duplicate paperwork, and is in general fairly annoying to deal with.  He is willing to go through the hassle because he found the lowest rates through them.  All five co-workers recommend Amerisave despite this one co-worker's difficulties. Another person I know has refinanced through mortgagefool.com twice with good results. In general I think online lenders are like brick and mortar lenders in that some will be good, some will be not-so-good.
I've shopped ToyRUs for years now. It was the go to store for my kids when they wanted a new toy, or just to kill time and let them see whats out before christmas shopping. I used to spend around 60-80% of my money there, then as the kids got older I shifted to around 20% with Amazon helping out so much. But this year they shut down several of the stores near me, including the one that I spent all my money at. Kmart did the same thing, and now the 2 brick and mortar stores I still spent money at are gone. I guess it's Amazon for 90% of my shopping now and target or (shudder) walmart for the rest. I shrug...if you're selling high quality products, this won't be a problem for you. If you're selling garbage, well, take it to Ebay.   The reality is they're competing with Wal-Mart who's the rent-a-center of returns. This lines them up brick and mortar policy now. That broad figure is rather useless on its own. People buy mostly things they need right away.  A useful analysis would a multi-variable one, graphing 3-way correlations of:  - price - profit margin - average half-life of the product  Maybe across a few separated categories, online vs brick-and-mortar, normalised towards the median and 3 standard deviations on each variable.  These would be some neat graphs if only the data was available. In the United States, savings accounts generally have higher interest rates than checking or money market accounts.  Part of this is the government restriction on the number of automated transactions per month that can be done on a savings account: this is supposed to allow banks to lengthen the time frame of the cash part of their investments for savings.  This limit is why direct deposit of one's paycheck is almost always into a checking or money market account... and why many people have savings accounts, especially with Internet banks, because they pay significantly higher interest rates than brick and mortar banks. "In practical terms, these days, a credit union IS a small ""savings and loan"" bank -- the kind of bank that used to exist before bankers started making money on everything but writing loans. They aren't always going to offer higher interest and/or cheaper loans than the bank-banks, but they're almost always going to be more pleasant to deal with since they consider the depositors and borrowers their stockholders, not just customers. There are minor legal differences (different insurance fund, for example), and you aren't necessarily eligible to open an account at a randomly-chosen credit union (depending on how they've defined the community they're serving), but they will rarely affect you as an account holder. The main downside of credit unions is that, like other small local banks, they will only have a few branches, usually within a limited geographic area. However, I've been using a credit union 200 miles away (and across two state lines on that route, one if I take a large detour) for decades now, and I've found that between bank-by-mail, bank-by-internet, ATM machines, and the ""branch exchange"" program (which lets you use branches of participating credit unions as if they were branches of your own) I really haven't felt a need to get to the branch.  I did find that, due to network limitations of $50K/CU/day, drawing $200,000 worth of bank checks on a single day (when I purchased the house) required running around to four separate branch-exchange credit unions. But that's a weird situation where I was having trouble beating the actual numbers out of the real estate agents until a few days before the sale. And they may have relaxed those limitations since... though if I had to do it again, I'd consider taking a scenic drive to hit an actual branch of my own credit union. If you have the opportunity to join a credit union, I recommend doing so. Even if you don't wind up using it for your ""main"" accounts, they're likely to be people you want to talk to when you're shopping for a loan." Sounds like a poorly written piece at best... The way you make money with a mortgage, if you're careful and/or lucky and/or patient, is to use that loan to make leveraged investments. If the return on the investments is higher than the interest on the loan, you win. Of course if the investments don't do well you can lose money on this deal... but at current interest rates it isn't that hard to make a profit on this arrangement, especially if you can get the tax deductability helping you. "I think the answer to this is just ""no.""  It's not commonly available to have the option to obtain a mortgage at a fixed amount and fixed rate, especially over a timeframe like the 5 yrs you mentioned in your question.  There would be several practical problems with such a thing, including but not limited to: As was noted in a comment to your question, it is common to be able to ""lock"" a rate over a period of days to weeks.  This isn't the same as what you asked though, because it's much shorter term and it's typically tied to having an offer accepted on a specific house." I work for a mortgage company but one that sells the loans we fund to banks. I've never heard of that risk mitigation incentive (lower rate for auto payments) but I know for a fact you will have a higher interest rate if you choose to pay your taxes and insurance out of your own pocket and not escrow them. I would contact the CFPB instead of an attorney and they will be able to tell you very quickly whether this is an acceptable practice or not.