How this works, without the marketing.
We publish calculators and guides, and we can help start a matching process with lenders. We do not lend money, approve anyone, or set a rate. Below is the whole sequence, including the parts we do not control — because knowing where our involvement ends is more useful to you than a claim that it never does.
Not a lender
Referral and education
Free to use
No consumer fees, ever
Since 2019
Serving U.S. consumers
Nothing stored
Calculators run in your browser
Five steps. One decision stays yours.
Select any step to see what happens at that stage, and who is responsible for it.
You submit an inquiry
A short form covering identity, contact info, and income.
You provide basic information: name, address, income, and bank account. This is submitted over an encrypted connection. We do not perform a hard credit check at this stage. The form is designed to be minimal — no hidden upsells, no pre-checked boxes for marketing spam.
Accurately, including the awkward part.
The request form is not ours. The loan request form is operated by an independent third-party provider. Information entered into it is transmitted to that provider and to lenders in its network. It is labeled as third-party on the page it appears on. We do not receive a copy of what you type into it, and we cannot retrieve, edit, or delete it on your behalf.
That provider routes it to lenders in its network. Which lenders see your request, and in what order, is the provider's decision rather than ours. We are not going to claim we vet their panel, because we do not — and a promise we cannot keep is worth less to you than this sentence. What you can do is verify any lender who contacts you on NMLS Consumer Access before you sign anything.
The lender decides, and must disclose in writing. Under the Truth in Lending Act they have to give you the APR, the finance charge, the total of payments, and the payment schedule before you sign. Those four numbers are the offer. Declining costs you nothing.
Separately, and worth the contrast: the calculators on this site transmit nothing at all. They run in your browser, and the Dashboard and Planner keep their data in your own device's storage. Data you enter into the Dashboard and Planner is stored in your browser using the Web Storage API. It is not transmitted to our servers.
Four reasons to walk away.
These are things you can check yourself, in a minute, without trusting anyone's claim about anyone else. That is why they are framed this way rather than as a list of who we screen out.
A fee requested before funding
Advance-fee fraud, essentially without exception. No licensed U.S. lender requires payment before disbursing a loan — legitimate fees are deducted from the proceeds or added to the repayment schedule. A demand for money up front is disqualifying on its own, regardless of how convincing everything else looks.
Guaranteed approval
Impossible before verification, and therefore a claim only made by operations that are not verifying anything. We cannot tell you whether you will be approved either — nobody honestly can before a lender looks at your file, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.
A lender you cannot find on NMLS
NMLS Consumer Access is free and takes about a minute. If a lender is not findable there and cannot explain why, that is your answer. It is also worth confirming that the product they are offering is permitted in your state: a licensed lender exceeding your state's ceiling, or an unlicensed one at any rate, is a reason to walk away from an otherwise attractive number.
Pressure to sign immediately
A legitimate offer survives being read overnight. Urgency exists to prevent comparison, and comparison is the single most valuable thing you can do — the gap between a good offer and a poor one on the same loan is frequently measured in hundreds of dollars.
What we cannot do
StraightSum is an independent publisher and referral service. We are not a lender, a loan broker, a loan servicer, a credit services organization, or a subsidiary, agent, or affiliate of any lender or lead network. Forms hosted on this site by third-party providers are clearly identified as such.
- Tell you whether you will be approved. No honest party can, before a lender verifies your details.
- Quote the rate you personally would receive. Published ranges are network-wide; yours depends on underwriting, your file, and your state.
- Change, pause, or discuss an existing loan. Once a lender funds it, they are the only party who can act on it.
- Guarantee funding times. Verification, cut-off times, weekends, and your own bank all affect it.
- Retrieve or delete what you entered into the third-party request form. Ask that provider, or the lender who received it.
Price it before you commit.
Thirty seconds in the cost calculator tells you the estimated APR with the fee folded in and the total in dollars. If the payment only fits in a month where nothing goes wrong, it does not fit — and that is worth finding out here rather than on a signature page.