The Quicken Loans Skip-A-Year Mortgage Sweepstakes | An infographic by the team at Quicken Loans Racing

This infographic was submitted to us by Quicken Loans Racing.

This infographic is organized pretty clearly, and the message is obvious: what if you didn’t have to pay your mortgage for a year, and what could you do with that money instead? There’s some data viz and a lot of numbers to digest, but the text is kept low and the design clean enough to follow it.

I do wish the “How Could $14,160 Impact Your Financial Future” section was a little more to-the-point, though. It shows how much average debt is, how much all Americans owe, and how long it would take to pay that all off, but there’s no simple correlation to show how much of the average debts would be paid off by not paying mortgage for a year! Looks like it would pay off 53% of the average student debt, 81% of the average car loan, and 91% of the average credit card debt. And instead of showing how many minutes of work it would take to pay off the whole thing, maybe how many minutes or hours of work you’d have left to pay it off afterward? Something to bring the correlation between those numbers and the money/time saved even closer.

I’m also a little unclear on the stacks of money being used as data viz. Without a key, I can’t determine what one stack of money stands for, so I don’t see the relationship between the money and the number. $26,682 has 12 stacks of money (3 stacks, 5 stacks, and 1 stack), $17,433 has 10 stacks of money and $15,587 has 9… That means each stack of money represents, respectively, $2,223.50, $1,743.30, and $1,731.89. Consistency is important for the most effective data viz, so that readers don’t have to examine too closely to get the takeaway.

In all I’d give this infographic a B-. It’s clearly laid out and has a good overall message, but could use a bit more examination to the most effective points of comparison and the most effective use of data viz.

Infographic by EquityRelease.net

This graphic was submitted to us by EquityRelease.net

This is clearly laid out and tries to keep text to a minimum. The style isn’t overwhelming and the flow charts are easy to follow. It’s plenty informative and it ends with a nice example of a simple bar graph.

I do feel like there’s almost too much information here, though. It’s quite long infographic at over 9000 pixels full size, and although the text is not extreme, it does look rather heavy in places (How much will this cost?, Lifetime Mortgage vs Home Reversion Plan). Most of the individual elements are large enough that I can’t view them on my screen at one time. It’s nice to be able to read a chart all the way through without scrolling; perhaps scaling down some of the elements here would help with this.

I like the colors and the comprehensive nature of the information, but I think a bit too much was attempted here, and it winds up being a lot to digest. I’m sure that this infographic simplifies matters quite a great deal when compared to lengthy legal documents, but there should be even less text if possible and more visual representation. The bar graph I mentioned at the beginning is the only example of data viz, and is one of only a few numbers in the data that could be visualized.

As an infographic I’d have to give this a C, because there is only one example of data viz and it is just a whole lot to process, and whole lot of scrolling. Make it smaller and take out a few elements, adding in some visualizable data instead, and this could be a great infographic!

This infographic was submitted to us by RateSupermarket.ca

The information here is really valuable (literally!) and well organized. It shows a very clear way to save a substantial amount of dough on your mortgage over time, and there’s tons of data to support just how worthwhile it is to take these steps. There are just a few spots where adding extra data viz or illustration could save some text.

While I wouldn’t say this IG is text-heavy, the font size and the fact that all the text is in caps make it feel a little overbearing in places. One quick way to cut that down in each section: “Total Interest Saved” and “Your Savings” give the same information, and the “Your Savings” section is much cuter (look at that lovable owl!), so I’d suggest cutting out “Total Interest Saved.”

The 18% of Canadians who’ve made a lump sum payment isn’t actually visualized–it’d be better to see it as a pie chart, or maybe as 1 out of 5 Canadians (the owls again?). Plus, the visualizations for 2 years saved on rapid payments and 1 year saved on lump sum payments are the same–maybe there should be 2 calendars for the rapid payments.

The thing to take away from this is that these are mostly very picky critiques! Overall, this IG is clear, concise and to the point. It is a clear sales pitch, which in general is best to avoid with infographics, but people looking to save money on mortgages probably don’t mind when they’re being shown how much money they stand to save.

I’d give this infographic a B: take out the repetition, boost the data viz a bit and maybe include some general information on Canadian home buyers (how many homeowners? average age? fastest-growing province?) to offset the salesy feel.

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<div align="center"><a href=”http://blog.builddirect.com/cost-homeownership/” target="_blank"><img src="http://blog.builddirect.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/home-ownership-v2-lg.jpg" alt=”Cost of Home Ownership”></a> <br />View Other <a href="http://www.submitinfographics.com">Infographics</a></div> <p>

This infographic, by BuildDirect.com, covers the overall cost of home ownership including all of the little details like homeowners insurance, utility rates, and more. The infographic starts with a simple list of national averages for mortgage ($1,687), homeowners insurance ($804), and purchase price ($304,000). It then goes on to break costs down by state, starting with average utility rates by state. Based on this information, Idaho has the lowest utility rates at 4.88 cents per Kilowatthour and Hawaii costs a whopping 21.45 cdents per Kilowatthour! Next, the infographic puts utility rates into further perspective by showing the national average utility rates when compared to the highest and lowest priced states.

The right hand side of the infographic breaks down home costs by state, with some interesting findings. For instance, homes cost more in Montana and other mountain states than many coastal states. This information is broken down further by the final graphs, which show the top 5 most expensive states to buy a house followed by the 5 lease expensive.

Overall, the information is well presented and the design is unique when compared with many other infographics. The only big aesthetic issue with this infographic is that it looks pieced together. This would be fixed by making the background of the infographic itself a different color than white, as the bits of white spaces make the columns very separate when they shouldn’t be.