Annual Cap
  
Gettin' a mortgage? Great. You have two basic flavors. You can pay based on a fixed interest rate or you can pay based on an adjustable interest rate.
A fixed-rate mortgage provides you the same interest rate for the life of the mortgage. It is set at the time the loan is signed and stays the same for however long the mortgage is set to run for (typically 15 or 30 years).
For an adjustable-rate deal, the interest rate for the loan fluctuates along with overall interest rates as pegged to some standard like LIBOR as in..."the cost of your adjustable loan will be LIBOR plus 200 basis points, adjusted every quarter". So the interest shifts based on market conditions and based on the terms of the contract.
The fixed-rate option provides security, allowing the borrower to know what their payments will be...forever. The payments stay the same, no matter what happens in the interest rate market.
Meanwhile, a borrower with an adjustable-rate mortgage can see their payments change as interest rates move around. Getting this kind of mortgage is a type of gamble: the borrower is hoping that rates will go down and stay down, allowing them to pay less on the mortgage than if they had locked in a higher rate.
Many adjustable-rate mortgages have limits to the amount the rate can move around. These limits are called the "annual cap."
So say you get an adjustable-rate mortgage that starts off with a 5% interest rate and has a annual cap of two percentage points. In the first year, the bond market goes bonkers and overall interest rates spike by three percentage points. Theoretically, your mortgage rate should jump to 8%, but since you have the annual cap in place, it will only rise to 7%.
Caps come with strings attached: First, the cap also applies to the amount the interest rate can decline as well. If interest rates plunge, your rate might not drop as much, if you have a cap in place.
Second, some of these cap structures can get complicated.For instance, mortgage lender Freddie Mac outlines a "7/1 ARM with a 5/2/5 cap structure." ARM just means "adjustable rate mortgage." The "7/1" part indicates that your interest rate will remain steady for the first seven years, with the first adjustment set to take place in the eighth year. Adjustments will then continue on an annual basis after that.
The cap structure numbers - "5/2/5" - indicate that in that first adjustment in Year 8, the interest rate can move by 5 percentage points off the initial rate. It can then move by two percentage points per year in each subsequent year (that's the number two in the 5/2/5 set up). However, the rate can never move by more than five percentage points over the life of the mortgage (that's the last five there).
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is Adjustable-Rate Mortgag...17 Views
Finance allah shmoop What is adjustable rate mortgage or arm
Well here's an arm and here's a leg and that's
What Renting the money to buy a home costs you
Yeah Okay Eight r m stands for adjustable rate mortgage
The rate well that's The interest cost of the money
or the cost of renting that money to buy the
home Well the rate isn't it fixed in this case
like five point seven percent for thirty years Where you
know in advance that your monthly payments going to be
nine hundred forty three bucks a month or whatever it
is that would be a fixed mortgage a fixed number
You can count on it for all three hundred sixty
payments And then the house is all yours So that's
fixed then what's adjustable like yes the interest rate changes
But how does it change Well in a standard arm
there is some global standard on which the rates are
often price like lie bore the london interbank borrowing offering
rate It's one of the key things that price is
the cost of renting money all around the world with
the actual rate of libel or is generally reserved for
banks like super cheap cost of renting money to banks
who are very likely to pay back the money with
no hassle that rate is more or less what banks
pay for running the money along with blue chip customers
in real life The banks then mark up a premium
on top of the rate that they're paying to rent
the money to themselves And then they resell or re
rent that money teo their prized customers So the pricing
of bank my views in renting money to joe six
pack could be something like lie boer plus three percent
or three hundred basis points So if libel or is
it didn't say two and a half percent today the
adjustable rate might be five and a half percent and
all that's great honor given alone It might mean that
for a while you're paying seven hundred twelve dollars a
month for your house payment wonderfully cheap and in fact
banks market these low rates initially to help people be
able to afford tto by that new home and live
of the dream You know the american dream usually with
an arm there's a teaser rate that starts really low
Like at live or live or plus ten basis points
or something like ridiculously cheap for six months or a
year something like that Then it has an incremental set
of step ups in interest costs and venit adjust with
the markets usually upward maybe upward by a lot Remember
there's a reason it's called a teaser rate but then
if we get inflation or a you know just bank
nervousness for there are weird effects from brexit or the
volume of transactions going through london or something weird happens
Well then the liquidity drops and interest rates rise So
now lie board goes up and up and up to
four and a half percent and wealth contractually in your
mortgage paperwork you have to pay live or plus three
hundred basis points no matter what So now that's seven
and a half percent interest on the dough you borrowed
and well we're that toe happen It's likely that your
monthly payment has skyrocketed from seven hundred twelve dollars a
month is something more like twelve hundred dollars a month
or more Can you handle that big of a payment
Well have you done a fixed rate loan at nine
Hundred forty three dollars a month Well you'd still be
paying on that number but you rolled the dice with
an arm and now you owe big bills There go
that arm and a leg thing we warned you about 00:03:26.033 --> [endTime] eh
Up Next
What is the Arms Short Term Trading Index? The Arms Index is used to predict future market behavior. It gives investors an idea of what may happen...
What is a basis point? Basis points are how changes in financial securities are described. “The stock dropped 100 points” actually means that t...
The IRS taxes bondholders imputed interest based on whatever interest rate is imputed, or presumed, by the terms of the deal.