Home Mortgage Refinancing: Make Sure It Is Worth Your Effort
Monday, September 14th, 2009Home mortgage refinancing is worth your effort and time if the resulting refinanced loan helped you avoid foreclosure, if it is sustainable and if it reduces your total home loan costs.
Typically, during the boom times, the main reason for loan refinancing was to take advantage of the home equity. Homeowners refinanced their loans to get a higher principal and then use the extra cash to consolidate other debts, to finance their children’s education, to buy a new car, to pay medical bills or to make other major payments.
During this downturn, loan refinancing has become one of the options for avoiding foreclosure. It is one of the schemes offered by the Obama administration’s Making Home Affordable program for homeowners whose mortgages are owned by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.
Under the Home Affordable Refinance Program, your lender will provide you a copy of its loan refinancing estimate, which shows your new mortgage rate, your new monthly payment and the total amount you are going to pay over the number of years specified for you to pay the loan.
If you compare the new payments and terms and conclude that the refinanced loan is not an improvement over the original loan, then home mortgage refinancing may not be for you.
But do not compare only the monthly payments, especially if your original loan is an adjustable loan mortgage. In ARM refinancing, your monthly loan payment will always increase if you are converting into a fixed higher rate. For you, it would seem that the new rate is higher because you were given a teaser rate or you were given the option to pay only the interest of the loan, but ultimately the fixed higher rate would enable you to sustain your loan.
A loan refinancing for an ARM that is expected to reset to a much higher rate in the next several years is worth it because it will help you sustain payments in the long term. It will also help you cut your interest costs because of the record drop in mortgage rates.
If your home loan is fixed rate and you already have made payments for several years, consider carefully refinancing because you just might be increasing your total loan costs. In home mortgage refinancing, consider whether you are refinancing to a shorter or longer term and whether your refinancing costs will be covered by your savings from refinancing.
