Imagine… An Entire Year With No Mortgage Payment…
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.
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