The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: poetdereves on May 01, 2020, 08:59:45 AM
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I’ll try to keep this short. Our current rate is 3.75% and we owe $137k on our $180k mortgage. Current rates could put us at 3%, possibly even lower. Is it worth it to refinance to decrease our interest rate by .75%?
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Almost always, yes. Find an online refinance calculator to get actual numbers.
e.g.
https://www.zillow.com/mortgage-calculator/refinance-calculator/
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Looks like it will save me ~$100 a month to keep the same term. We don’t plan on being here forever and don’t want cash out, so might as well keep the extra $100 in my pocket I’d imagine.
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I'd do the refi and reset the loan to 30 years. watch the closing costs carefully as well. If you're not in your forever home, paying as little as possible while you're there increases your leverage.
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I have about the same loan value and I just refi'd to a 15 year. The rate was much lower, 2.9 compared to 3.3 for 30 year term. Also, we do plan to be in the house forever, and we want to pay off the house before FIRE, so it works perfectly for us. We also ended up with really low closing costs, about $1500, so it seems to have worked out all the way for us. Like you, to refi to a 30 year would only save us $100 a month or so, and since we plan to stay, we didn't want to extend the term that long. Although, if i could have gotten under 3% for 30 years, I would have certainly considered it, just for flexibility in the payments.