First the background. My girlfriend and I are living together. House is hers. She has a mortgage and a private loan with a family member. We would like to move to another house. Many reasons including location, land, something that would be ours rather than hers, etc. The 1 year time frame is so that she can finish paying back her family loan and the fact that there are 4 other houses for sale on the street. Plus although we have been dating a while the living together is new and neither of us is so blind to want to rush into anything. But we also are both old enough that we want a long term direction. Right now she is paying the loan back (it is for house repairs, roof, etc.) We are splitting the mortgage. I am putting quite a bit in savings towards a down payment. If/when we bought another house I would have the down payment and anything from this house would roll over into that which in the end would work out to be as much or more than I would have saved.
So my real question is all financial. We are trying to figure out the math on the best way to allocate funds and/or pursue other options. Refinance has been talked about in case we have trouble selling this place. But if we don't have any trouble selling it we could be throwing money away due to costs involved with refinancing. Also we could put a little extra towards the mortgage. Any place I can find some way to crunch the numbers on the refi? Anything I/we might be overlooking? I am thinking the best bet would just be to pay the mortgage as is and save whatever else we can. From what I have seen on refi costs vs savings it takes on average 2+years to break even.
Anyway any advice/direction would be much appreciated.