Mortgage Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
100 free Mortgage trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free fun mortgage trivia questions with answers, written for lender team meetings, real-estate office parties and anyone who has ever signed a 30-year note. It opens with the good stuff: why the word literally means 'death pledge', which town in 1775 saw the first building society, what a discount point actually buys you, and where the word escrow comes from. The middle section covers the institutions and the acronyms: FHA and the 3.5 percent down payment, the New Deal's HOLC and its infamous maps, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, VA loans with nothing down, FICO's 300-to-850 range, adjustable-rate notation and reverse mortgages at 62. Then it turns to the 2007-2010 subprime crisis, NINJA loans, Lehman, Dodd-Frank and The Big Short, with a few pop-culture questions on It's a Wonderful Life and Monopoly to keep the room awake. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia before publishing and each question links to its source. Difficulty runs from easy to hard, so seasoned loan officers and first-time buyers can play the same round.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'mortgage' comes from a Law French term meaning what?
Death pledge
Death pledge renders the Old French mort gage, literally 'dead pledge'; in the jurist Edward Coke's telling, the pledge dies either when the debt is paid or when the borrower defaults and loses the land.
Q 02A buyer who puts 20 percent down has a mortgage with what loan-to-value ratio?
80%
80% is what is left to borrow: loan-to-value is the loan divided by the home's value, and above that level US lenders usually make the borrower buy mortgage insurance.
Q 03In the early years of a standard amortising mortgage, most of each payment goes toward what?
Interest
Interest dominates the early payments because it is charged on the large outstanding balance; the split flips over time until the last payments are almost entirely principal.
Q 04What is the most common mortgage type in the United States?
The 30-year fixed rate
The 30-year fixed rate grew out of the New Deal: the Federal Housing Administration began backing long, fully amortised loans in place of short ones that had to be refinanced every few years.
Q 05What is a mortgage nicknamed when its balance falls due long before its payment schedule ends?
A balloon
Such a loan is a balloon mortgage: payments follow a long amortisation schedule, but the remaining balance falls due early. Before the FHA existed, most American mortgages were short balloon loans with big down payments.
Q 06Which mortgage type became closely tied to the mid-2000s subprime lending boom?
Interest-only
Interest-only loans let borrowers pay nothing toward principal for the first years; they spread in the 2000s housing boom, and when the interest-only period ended, payments jumped just as prices were falling.
Q 07What does Sharia law forbid that keeps observant Muslims from using a conventional mortgage?
Paying or receiving interest
Paying or receiving interest, known as riba, is forbidden, so in one common workaround the bank buys the house itself and the buyer pays it off in rent and instalments.
Q 08What does mortgage insurance protect?
The lender against borrower default
The lender against borrower default: the borrower pays the premiums, yet any payout after a foreclosure goes to the lender, which is why it is demanded on loans with small down payments.
Q 09In mortgage jargon, one 'point' equals what?
1% of the loan amount
A point is 1% of the loan amount, so one point on a $300,000 mortgage costs $3,000; borrowers pay discount points up front to buy a lower rate.
Q 10A mortgage escrow account is used to pay which two costs?
Property taxes and insurance premiums
Property taxes and insurance premiums are collected in monthly instalments alongside the loan payment and held in escrow, so the servicer can pay the tax and insurance bills when they fall due.
Q 11The word 'escrow' derives from an Old French word for what?
A scrap of parchment
A scrap of parchment, escroe in Old French, is the root: the deed was written on one and handed to a third party to hold until the bargain's conditions were met.
Q 12On an ARM, what is the 'teaser'?
A cheap introductory period
A cheap introductory period with a below-market rate is the teaser; once it ends the rate resets toward the full index rate, so a low teaser sets the borrower up for above-average payment increases.
Q 13Outside the United States, what is an ARM more commonly called?
A variable-rate or tracker
Q 21What happened to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September 2008?
Conservatorship
Conservatorship: they were put under a federal regulator that had existed for only weeks; the stopgap proved durable, and both were still under government control in 2024.
Q 22Which government agency guaranteed the first mortgage-backed security?
Ginnie Mae
Ginnie Mae was carved out of Fannie Mae in 1968 to stay inside the government when Fannie went private, which is why the securities it guarantees carry the full faith and credit of the United States.
Q 23VA home loans were created by which 1944 law?
The GI Bill
The GI Bill, formally the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, backed home loans with no down payment; millions of ex-servicemen took them up, helping drive the postwar move to the suburbs.
Abroad the product is a variable-rate or tracker mortgage, because the rate follows an index such as a central-bank base rate or, historically, LIBOR.
Q 14Which loan lets US homeowners aged 62 or over tap their home's value with no monthly repayments?
Reverse mortgage
A reverse mortgage pays the owner rather than the bank: the FHA-insured version is open to homeowners of 62 and over and is repaid only when the borrower no longer lives in the home.
Q 15Which president signed the act that created the Federal Housing Administration?
Roosevelt
Roosevelt signed the National Housing Act in 1934; beyond reviving home lending, he hoped it would put construction workers back on the job.
Q 16What minimum down payment did the FHA set for its insured loans in January 2009?
3.5%
3.5% is the floor written into the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, which also barred sellers from funding a buyer's down payment.
Q 17Which 1968 law outlawed the redlining that FHA appraisal standards had encouraged?
The Fair Housing Act
The Fair Housing Act, Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, banned discrimination in the sale, rental and financing of housing; FHA guidance had once told appraisers to avoid 'inharmonious racial groups'.
Q 18The New Deal's HOLC, created in 1933, existed mainly to do what?
Refinance defaulted mortgages
Refinance defaulted mortgages was its job: the Home Owners' Loan Corporation gave owners facing foreclosure longer, cheaper loans, and it also drew the colour-coded 'residential security' maps now synonymous with redlining.
Q 19Fannie Mae was set up in 1938 to do what with home loans?
Buy them
Buy them from the lenders: the cash let banks make fresh loans, creating a secondary market in mortgages that at first dealt mainly in FHA-insured ones.
Q 20Freddie Mac was created in 1970 for what purpose?
To compete with Fannie Mae
To compete with Fannie Mae was the aim: Congress chartered the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation in 1970, two years after Fannie itself had been turned from a government agency into a shareholder-owned company.
Q 24What is the range of a classic FICO credit score?
300 to 850
Classic FICO scores run from 300 to 850; when the three credit bureaus launched their rival VantageScore in 2006, it at first used an odd scale of 501 to 990 before switching to FICO's range.
Q 25Which three national credit bureaus supply the data behind US mortgage credit checks?
Experian, Equifax and TransUnion
Experian, Equifax and TransUnion are the three national bureaus; mortgage lenders usually pull a tri-merge report from all three and underwrite on the middle of the three scores.
Q 26The world's first building society was founded in Birmingham in 1775 at what?
An inn
An inn: Richard Ketley, landlord of the Golden Cross, formed the society there, and subscribers paid monthly into a common fund that financed a house for each of them.
Q 27A building society differs from a bank in that it is owned by whom?
Its members
A building society is a mutual owned by its members, the savers and borrowers, rather than by shareholders; Abbey National kicked off the UK demutualisation wave when it converted to a bank in 1989.
Q 28In It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey runs what kind of institution in Bedford Falls?
A building and loan
George runs a building and loan, the Bailey Brothers' Building and Loan; Frank Capra's Christmas classic has James Stewart talking a panicked crowd out of a run on it while Mr. Potter circles.
Q 29In Monopoly, how much does the bank pay you when you mortgage an unimproved property?
Half its purchase price
The mortgage value printed on each deed is half its purchase price, so Mediterranean Avenue's $60 price mortgages for $30; any houses on the colour group must be sold back before a property can be mortgaged.
Q 30What surcharge does Monopoly add when you lift a mortgage?
10%
Lifting a mortgage costs the mortgage value plus a 10% charge, so a property mortgaged for $100 takes $110 to redeem, and its owner may not collect rent on it until it is lifted.