AimLoan.com 4.375% 30-Year Mortgage

This is the lowest interest rate we could find in the big databases at Bankrate.com and Interest.com.

With a loan this cheap you’d only pay $500 a month in principal and interest for every $100,000 borrowed. (This mortgage calculator will allow you to determine the monthly payments for any home loan.)

To obtain a 4.375%, 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage from AimLoan.com you’ve got to pay $1,995 in fees and 1.673 discount points (which is prepaid interest, with each point equaling 1% of the amount you’re borrowing).

But that’s pretty reasonable. To get the best rates you often have to pay twice that much in fees, and a mortgage with no points costs at least 4.875% in most markets.

The AimLoan.com offer is available in 40 of the 50 states and we couldn’t find local or national lenders with comparable offers in any of the markets we looked at.

The fine print: The rates we checked are for borrowers with credit scores of at least 700 and who need conforming loans, which means they’re for less than $417,000. For scores from 680 to 699 you’ll usually pay higher fees, up to 1% of the loan value, or a higher rate.

Deals like this are long gone. Yet some banks and credit unions keep promoting “High-Yield” accounts that are paying practically nothing. Our Worst Rate of the Week singles out some of the offenders and asks them to stop. It’s on Bankaholic’s Personal Finance Blog, which you can always reach by clicking on the “finance” tab at the top of this page.