The number under the number

What a home really costs to own.

Your mortgage payment is the small part, and the only part most calculators show you. Here is the rest of it, with tax rates measured from what people actually paid rather than a millage table.

Purchase price

Deposit, %

Rate, %

Loan term

Where

This will be my primary residence

Insurance, a year

Flood, a year

Not sure? Work both out here and come back.

Dues, a month

CDD, a year

Maintenance, % of the building a year

What it actually costs, month one

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Looking at one particular house in Lee County? The Property Appraiser will give you the exact figure for that parcel, using its own millage rate. Lee County tax estimator. It knows whether the property sits inside a city, which matters more than people realise: a Cape Coral parcel is taxed at about 15.4 mills against 11.5 in Lehigh Acres, and that gap is the city.

Two things worth doing next

Work out the insurance properly, because it is the number most likely to be wrong here. Then, if you are weighing this against staying put, see whether buying actually wins.

Insurance and flood Rent or buy

Illustrative, not a loan estimate. Your rate, your taxes and your insurance will be set by people looking at your file, not by this page.

Effective tax rates are measured from our own closed sales in the last twelve months: the tax actually billed divided by the price actually paid, so they already include county, city, school and fire district levies. Florida reassesses on sale, so the figure used is the median of the recently traded half, which is what a buyer walks into rather than what the seller was paying. Homestead exemption is applied as an approximation: $25,000 against all levies plus a further $25,000 against everything except school.