About this site

Who writes it

My name is Dan Swenson. I am a data nerd who is also a Minnesota workers' compensation attorney and a city council member. Public information should not be hard to use, so I build this network of sites as a hobby: I pull scattered public records out of PDFs and government databases and turn them into tools regular people can actually use. I do not use these sites to find legal clients, except for MN Comp Buddy which is my actual day job. The tools are free. The sites pay for their own hosting through clearly disclosed referral links and a few optional paid guides.

This site is an educational publication in the self-help tradition: it explains a federal regulation, cites its sources, and computes its numbers from public data anyone can check. It is not a lender, not a broker, and not a law firm acting for you; nothing here is legal or financial advice about your situation, and reading this site does not create an attorney-client relationship. A longer bio, and the other sites in the same family, live at mnbuddynetwork.com/dan and mnbuddynetwork.com/sites.

Why it exists

The Loan Estimate rule was designed to make mortgage shopping standardized and nearly free, and it works, but mostly for people who know it exists. The industry has little reason to mention that the form is nearly free, that its core numbers bind the lender, or that collecting three of them is exactly what the regulation contemplates. Meanwhile the government publishes, every year, the actual rates and costs of nearly every mortgage in the country, in a file format almost no consumer will ever open. This site exists to even that up: the rule explained on one side, the public numbers in usable form on the other.

How this site makes money

Right now, it does not. There are no ads and no affiliate links on this site today. Sites in this family make money through disclosed referral links, and if a lender-referral program is ever added here it will be labeled where it appears, no lender will pay to look better in the data tables, and the tables and text will not change because a partnership exists. The data pages are computed from public records and are never sold.

Corrections

If something here is wrong or out of date, email dan@mnbuddynetwork.com. The regulation text controls the rules pages, and the methodology page documents the data pages, so anything on this site can be checked against its source.