My situation has improved quite a bit since I bought my house. When I bought the house my income was $76,500 and my wife was a stay at home mom. The interest rate we got was 4.625%.
Today, I earn $100,000 and my wife about $50,000. We have $200,000 left on our loan and about $57,000 in equity. I plugged our numbers into online calculators and was getting rates around 4.0%. Since then, I called 3 banks and got the following quotes (these are all big national institutions).
Bank A: Current bank. Offers 3.9% with $3,000 in fees. We would save $69 in P+I every month with this offer.
Bank B: Offers 3.875% with $2,253 in fees. Monthly reduced in P+I = 91
Bank C: Offers 4.0%. Fees are listed as ($35), which to me seems to be a $35 credit. Save $81 in P+I every month.
Bank C seems to be the best choice. Significantly lower rate with no upfront costs. That raises some questions:
1) For those who have refinanced, are there other fees that for some reason are not listed with the fees in your quote that might make the whole thing not worth it?
2) My wife just started school. She will probably have to reduce her work hours such that she would gross about $30k per year. She may have to do this in 30 days. Could that derail this and make it not worth it? If we move really fast, how quickly might we finish the process?
3) Bank C seems pretty good. Is there any reason to believe we might be able to get significantly lower rates, or would people generally be happy with this kind of rate reduction?
4) How much leeway do the lenders have for negotiation. I want to tell bank C to lower their rate by 10 basis points with no effect on fees. Are such requests unreasonable?
5) Any other considerations?
Thank you.