Conceptually, it's easy to grasp why and when you should refinance your mortgage. In practice, inertia is the main reason people hold back from refinancing. With that in mind, we present these mortgage calculator which will allow you to see how your current mortgage will compare with the mortgage you are considering. Perhaps if the math is enticing, you'll shop around? Enjoy!

We'd like to thank Hugh Chou for compiling the equations that we needed to create this calculator, and Ironman at Political Calculations for providing the calculator framework.

Don't Quit Your Day Job... is now on Twitter, check us out by clicking this link or the slick icon in the subscribe section. Special thanks to Bret at Hope to Prosper for being our first follower! For the record, the first user DQYDJ followed is Nelson at Financial Uproar. Congratulations, or whatever superlative normally goes with Twitter accomplishments. To the rest of our readers, there is still time to grab one of the other milestone spots like 1,000th reader - or 10th...

Here at DQYDJ we've rambled on recently about the affordability of homes, and even tried to convince you that when mortgage interest rates are low it's not necessarily a good time to purchase a house. We've tried to make the point that affordability in Real Estate seems conditioned on affording payments instead of the actual purchase price of a home. That said, we left our readers hanging by not graphing that affordability with changing interest rates.

For a deeper background, please visit "Rooting for Price Increases and Low Interest Rates" for a description of the DQYDJ Median Home Affordability Index, and "Home Price Affordability Calculator" to play with the affordability numbers yourself.

In our last article, we promised you a calculator so you can copy our methodology and calculate 'affordable' houses by determining what an acceptable monthly payment would be. In our current article, we deliver! Thanks to Ironman at Political Calculations for the calculator creation script, it was very useful once again!

I've mentioned it in previous posts, but I'll say it here again: I purchased a house this year, against the advice of many (and to the delight of a select few). One of the things you will note if you undertake your own house hunt (or you'll recall if you've ever purchased a house) is the massive information disparity which exists between the house-hunter (or seller) and Realtor(s). Even though, with few exceptions, real estate purchases are the largest purchases most of us will make in our lives, transparency is non-existent and bad advice abounds. For starters, and the purpose of this article, I'd like you to consider two statements: "it's a good thing when home prices rise" and "It's a good time to buy now, interest rates are low". Let's consider those, shall we?

Weeks and links for the week - including an editor's pick.

Here's an interesting link, this time brought to you by an Economist piece which asks, "Who are the world's biggest employers?". Luckily, they answer. The top spot went to our own United States Department of Defense, with a whopping 3.2 million people on the payroll.

What, am I crazy? Peyton Manning of the Indianapolis Colts is probably a doubtful start for the rest of the 2011 season, and perhaps has made his last start of his Colts career (The Colts would owe Manning $28 million if they exercised his contract for another year at the end of 2011 - crazy to think about). He is also due to make at a minimum $23.4 million this year - $20 million as a signing bonus for his new contract and $3.4 million in guaranteed salary. Luckily I left myself an out - the problem with painting every sports contract with the "overpaid" brush is there is an army of athletes who will never touch the salaries which make us do a double take. As Frédéric Bastiat wrote in his essay What is Seen and What is Not Seen, "Let us accustom ourselves, then, not to judge things solely by what is seen, but rather by what is not seen."This article requires a special shout-out to Nelson Smith at Financial Uproar who planted the seed - sorry I waited until the third week of NCAA football to write this!

Carnivals and featured links for the week!

We recently covered a lot of the fallout from Standard and Poor's recent downgrade of the debt of the United States. The United States has 50 states which also issue their own debt, and get their own credit rating from the credit ratings firms. Luckily (this time) the legwork has been done, and I'm able to just link you to the primary source, the Tax Foundation! So view on to see the credit ratings of the states.