Home buyers are obsessed with numbers ― unfortunately, it’s often the wrong ones. They tend to focus on the price of a house and generally pay little or no attention to the interest rate of their mortgage loan.

With apologies to former President Bill Clinton, “It’s the mortgage interest rate, stupid.”

Some buyers mistakenly think they are taking the most affordable route when they buy a less expensive house. But that isn’t necessarily true.

The New York Times did the math for you on this one: Let’s say you are determined to not spend more than $2,000 a month on your mortgage. In mid-September, according to Freddie Mac, a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage was 3.78 percent and you could have afforded a $430,000 loan. Today, with interest rates at about 4.45 percent, you could only afford a $397,000 loan.

When mortgage rates go up, listing prices generally go down. While that’s not a hard and fast rule, and certainly things like the state of the economy and the job market play a huge role, the common wisdom is that, being unable to control the mortgage rate, if a seller wants to keep the house affordable to the largest pool of potential buyers, they lower the price so that buyers have “less to mortgage.”

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