Are mortgages the only things that lock? Locking is when a lender fixes on one rate. They promise to lend you the money that you seek at this particular interest rate and it will close in a certain period of time as well, knows as the lock period. The lock is always dependant on one things, at least, and that is the borrower meeting all of the lenders qualifications. They are going to go through your credit history like no one ever has before. This is a significant amount of money they are lending you and they cannot afford to make a mistake. The home loan market is the only market that does this locking and there is a reason for that. There is volatility to this market and since such large sums of money are being dealt with everyone needs to know they are not getting the short end of the stick. Process delays are another incentive to get things locked in. Process delays are the difference between when the terms are agreed upon and the time when the money is actually given to the borrower. Whether you have a lock is not so important in a good and stable market but in a fluctuating one it is absolutely necessary. In fact they are not all that important if you are not going to have to worry about processing delays either because you know you will get your money before the market does something that may hurt you in the end. The best part of locks on interest rates is that it is really only the lender that is committed to anything. If the market drops and you can get a better rate you are perfectly within your right to do so, this is known as falling out and it happens all of the time. Locking is really only there to protect the borrower not the lender. You will find that the longer your lock period is the higher your points will be as well. In fact, there was a time when borrowers interested in getting a lock had to pay a commitment fee, this made them tied to this deal as well as the lender. This fee is like putting a down payment down for something, if you back out you do not get this money back, that is why you put it down in the first place, to show your level of commitment. Of course borrowers were not big fans of this and as the lending market got more and more competitive these fees were done away with completely. Now lenders simply make falling out a little harder by introducing more paperwork. If you are seriously interested then I guess you will take the time to fill out the applications and submit to the credit checks. This is great if you really are interested because as a result you will get even lower rates. While this is a good thing if you end up choosing this lender it makes shopping for the perfect mortgage loan much more tedious and time consuming. Just make sure to find out how long you will have to wait for your loan to get processed as well as just how your lock is going to work.