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Show HN: Free mortgage analysis tool to avoid getting screwed by closing costs

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A side business I have is people who contact me because they just got scammed or need help knowing if something is a scam.

One of the things I tell them is to never upload financial documents containing personal information unless:

- The company they’re uploading it to is well known like a major bank and the domain in the address bar matches.

- They know the company they’re dealing with - which means a business address at a minimum and preferably a phone number.

- Avoid anything which claims to save money or be necessary which has a call to action to start uploading personal, documents.

This site fails all 3 tests. I was able to find the founder via the name and LinkedIn link. But at least put up a legitimate business name and something like a PO Box.

Registering a business name is $35 where this developer is located. A PO Box is around $80 a year. The name “closing.wtf” doesn’t seem to be registered with the state as a legitimate business. These are all red flags to “avoid”.

If you’d like a free cybersecurity analysis of your site, I’d be happy to offer a few free expert consulting hours to aain. Reply here and I’ll contact you on LinkedIn.

6 days agoby trollbridge

The privacy and security part is not inspiring confidence. Scrolling to the next section got me thinking "Don't get scammed at closing, get scammed before closing after uploading your mortgage documents to a random website."

Cool idea though.

7 days agoby kojeovo

I once knew a founder of a pre-GPT-3 AI product that analyzed certain cost-adjacent documents to find "hidden" optimizations. The "AI" was the founder, an expert in that industry, churning through the uploaded documents himself and writing reports by hand detailing potential cost savings. How far we've come!

7 days agoby brendanjbond

What actions can you take by the time you are at closing ?

I'm a licensed real estate agent, I actually got my license not just to learn about the business but to be able to save myself on agent commissions if I want to make an offer (if you can pass a CS data structures class you should be able to get a real estate license online in a matter of months), and I still would not try to optimize on closing costs.

Do I shop loans ? Absolutely. Are closing costs a scam ? Absolutely.

Would I try to optimize closing costs in the context of making a purchase ?

No.

In the time you have to decide the one really important question (whether to proceed or not) you need to spent it understanding the worst possible parts of the transaction you are about to make, NOT focusing on the closing costs.

Some class action lawyers should be worrying about optimizing these fees. Shop your loan, but spend your time investigating the property.

Pretending to be a site helping mortgage borrowers not get scammed while actually being a mortgage lead gen portal though : chef's kiss.

6 days agoby aorloff

I redacted my personal information from my loan estimate and your system couldn't process it. I don't see why you need that information to pull the closing cost numbers?

6 days agoby virtualneuro

I tried it out with docs from my last refi. Tried both PDF and PNG files, both returned "An error occurred with processing your document. Please confirm you uploaded a valid Loan Estimate or Closing Disclosure PDF."

I also at first didn't notice there is action needed to choose between uploading a Loan Estimate vs Closing Disclosure. It doesn't seem insurmountable to have the site automatically figure out the difference between those two.

7 days agoby JimA

I don't get it. What is the difference between:

    I want to pay less
    I want to pay less, and here's a document an AI wrote for me

The scenario you've outlined doesn't make sense. It sounds like your goal is to collect these idiosyncratic documents. Which is also unusual - like why do the documents matter? What is the purpose?

7 days agoby doctorpangloss

This looks really useful. I'll definitely be using this in the near future. However, I unnecessarily downloaded the sample loan estimate PDF and uploaded it again in order to view the report. Please make the "view sample report" button more prominent, or add another "view sample report" button within the blue "Try it out!" box.

7 days agoby samteeeee

Not wanting to upload my info here, but what, concretely, does this tool do?

Does it scan to see if some of the fees I am agreeing to are higher than average? If I am paying for some services that should be no-cost or have no real value?

7 days agoby cool_dude85

This is great. Really good work. This looks really useful, and I think you did a great job on the interface and site in general. I hope you aren't discouraged by the other commenters, keep hacking!

7 days agoby avanwyk

There's a number of threads here about privacy/security concerns. I'm curious what should be the bar for grassroots/bootstrapped projects like this?

Having recently taken a company through ISO 27001:2022 it's a pretty expensive and time consuming process, that doesn't seem reasonable to do early on in a projects creation - you don't yet know if you have product market fit.

However, you're wanting people or companies to trust you with their data - so it starts to feel a little chicken/egg

What's the best middle ground here for building trust whilst acquiring your first users?

5 days agoby mnahkies

Hmmmm. On one hand "closing.wtf" definitely stands out... So many startups have boring branding. But on the other hand, you are building in a legacy space. It's important to build trust & pay attention to the feedback here.

Does your target demographic understand "startups" or do they just want to solve the problem?

4 days agoby jzone3

why upload the actual document? why not let users enter only numbers?

7 days agoby sccomps

This is essentially the inverse of how big banks are using commercial AI tools for document entity extraction and analysis. For example, https://cloud.google.com/solutions/lending-doc-ai?hl=en

I can see why this could be useful, but I also think it might be overkill compared to just an explanatory doc a homebuyer could reference that explains each section of their estimate. It also opens the developer to loads of potential risk in handling personal financial data.

6 days agoby eitally

If I'm interested in paying an expert to look at the settlement cost estimates and find areas where I might be getting screwed, or could negotiate to save on closing costs, is that a thing? What's the title for a professional human who does what this AI tool says it does? It sounds useful, I'd just rather pay a person for this service.

6 days agoby karaterobot

here, take my data but tell me nothing about yourself.

7 days agoby niyogi

Shows a graph in your terminal: find out if it's better to put in a smaller downpayment and invest the rest.

https://github.com/whyboris/mortgage-and-investments

6 days agoby yboris

Mortgage life hack: pay bi-weekly to pay off mortgage faster while paying less money!

https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/bi-weekly-mortgage-calcul...

6 days agoby yboris

This seems odd. If you need certain fees and line items explained to you, why not ask your lender? Surely you have a loan officer that can explain every item and why it is there.

If you don’t like some of the costs, go with another lender, or negotiate those with your loan officer.

I’m not sure what this tool is offering that individuals don’t already have.

7 days agoby SamuelAdams

Hey. I ended up with an error saying my PDF could not be processed? But it’s my final loan disclosure form…

Also, I’m not entirely sure what costs this avoids? Inspection fees are already paid at this point, notary fees are paid to your broker, and transfer tax happens months later.

7 days agoby freeone3000

My favorite closing cost for the house I sold in February was $43,000 in excise tax to the city

3 days agoby tomcam

hmm, I just read the terms of service....

ahem get a damn lawyer to redo it before you get sued my some State AG....

in this area you cross all t's and dot i's before launch rather than half ass-launch right into a lawsuit.

6 days agoby fredgrott

Good job on the product and launching @aaln!

I can see it being useful for many home buyers.

I’m curious if AI tools like this are just wrappers around ChatGPT? Do they use their own LLM?

If you upload mortgage documents directly to ChatGPT can you get similar results?

6 days agoby aoppaol