Sounds like a great success! What is the rate on the mortgage? And do you have any plans to pay it off ahead of schedule now that PMI is gone?
Current mortgage is @ 4.00%. Interestingly, it's getting that rate that got us PMI in the first place. We bought the house with 20% down in 2007 (closed in dec) which was, of course, at the peak of the bubble. Initial rate was something like 7%. Refinanced in 2010, but because of major depreciation of the house we didn't have the cash to keep 20% equity so ended up with PMI, though overall monthly P&I cost reduced by a couple hundred and PMI was only ~$40/mo so was worth it.
We took all the savings + other and have made a couple lump sum 10% payments. Our lender (credit union) provides a re-amortization with a 10% principal payment + $100 fee. This (re-fi plus 2 10% payments) has reduced out monthly P&I obligation by ~50%. Currently our home value is ~$300k with a $680 payment and 22 years or so on the note if we ONLY payed that, which is in our opinion stellar.
The only black mark is we didn't jump the hoops to get rid of PMI before the "scheduled" time. It was somewhat bizarre to us that paying down the mortgage to >20% equity vs original value wasn't enough to remove the PMI. The only way to have it automatically drop off was to wait for the originally
scheduled time for which the loan would have been at 20% equity if we had only paid the minimum. To drop it before that time we had to get an appraisal. It was very strange. Apparently even if we had paid it off to 99.99% of the original value it would have required an appraisal. Crazy!
Luckily the market in our area is booming again (probably a bubble) so the appraisal "passed with flying colors".
We probably won't do any more 10% payments, but we keep paying @ roughly the original payment which will further reduce the interest and term. We've decided to do it this way because paying down extra principal each month saves significantly more overall interest than doing infrequent, big lump payments.
Our goal now is to move to a different house and rent out this one, as the rent we could get from this house would be roughly 2x the total (mortgage+taxes+etc) cost. We would dump 100% into paying off the current mortgage. Such a move would allow us to sell one car or at least vastly reduce the miles per year (which is already pretty low) as I could start riding my bike to work again.
