Three Sensible Indicators Before you Refinance Your Mortgage

When my brother (a Marine) came home from his one year tour of duty in Iraq, one of his agendas was to re-finance his house. So we set out to do some research and get the best deal possible. We found out the Re-financing makes sense if the following factors work to your favor.

The first Factor is the Interest Rate.

The three banks we looked at were requiring at least a credit score of 700 or above.  We had gotten a free copy of his credit score from all three credit bureaus. These are credit TransUnion, Equifax and Experian.  Using this free report the banks can give you a preliminary report on what the lowest interest rate would be and it does not lower your scores.

The second factor is the Point associated with the refinances.

Points are fees paid up front to the lender in exchange for a lower interest rate on a mortgage loan. Each point is equal to one percent of the total mortgage loan amount. To determine if point are going to lower your interest rate, you will need to consider the certain indicators. These includes what you can afford to pay up front, how long you plan to keep the home, and how long it will take you to recover the cost of paying points. We decided we did not want points

The third factor is Closing Costs.

These are the fees incurred when preparing the re-finance.  Theses included things like the application fee, appraisal fee, title search and title insurance and the like.  We found out that this could add up and be a figure. Now l had learnt from the Clark Howard show that, to justify your closing cost in a refinance situation you need to recover that cost in 30 months or less. So we come up with a figure that we determined not to go below.

We also learnt that the banks were also looking at the equity of his house. This was very interesting. My brother had only owned this house for one year however he had two things working for him. One we had really searched for this house and got it at a great price hence buying it at way below market value (the trick we agreed to do some repairs and used that to lower the price substantial) or we were just lucky either way it worked.

Second my brother got deployed and used the extra money he made to pay off his mortgage. Hence he turned out to have great equity in his home. Thus the three banks were eager to do his refinance.

The end result, we did not use the three the lending institutions. Instead we had the bank he currently had the mortgage with. It turned out that they had the best deal. He now has a 15 year fixed loan at 4.5%. His monthly payment only increased by 50 dollars his closing costs were only 800 dollars which he paid of cash. The research however paid of

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