It’s definitely getting easier and easier. Docs can be signed electronically. They have records of your previous appraisal so you don’t have to get a new one. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have new services to verify your income and assets without ever providing a paystub or bank statement.
Has anyone used Quicken Loans to refinance?
We’ve refinanced a ton of mortgages over the years. It’s pretty easy, but time consuming. Be prepared to provide documentation, such as your last 2 pay stubs, last 2 year tax returns, W-2s, etc. If they offer e-signatures, do it.
The things you need to compare are the re-financing closing costs against dollars saved in total interest paid at the new interest rate AT THE SAME LOAN LENGTH.
It’s important to compare the savings at the same loan term even if you are refinancing to a shorter term. While going from 25 years left on a 30 year term at 3.5% to a 15 year at 3.5% will save you total interest paid in the long run, you don’t need to refinance to get those savings. You simply calculate what the new payment would be at the 15 year term and send in that amount each month. You then save yourself the refinancing/closing cost of a new loan.
Even if you can get a better rate it may or may not be worth refinancing.
If you have $125K left on your loan and they are offering you a 1/2% lower rate than what you have, while you may save $4K in interest closing costs might be $3,500. Is it worth the hassle for $500?
About re-financing: yes, I have done it three times on my one house purchase, twice with the original lender and once to get away from that lender (Wells Fargo, surprise!).
When we bought the house in 2004 we could get away with 5% down and a 2nd mortgage for the other 15%, but as a result we were very house poor. Home values in SF went up so fast that in two years we were able to re-fi and consolidate everything into a single mortgage. It re-set the clock but I didn’t care since we were only in it 2 years. The next time was initiated by Wells Fargo a few years later, when they were getting in trouble, in California and elsewhere, for all their shenanigans (I’m not aware of any shenanigans they had pulled in our case). They spontaneously offered to lower the interest rate by two points and it wouldn’t re-set the clock. I took it.
The last time was maybe 4 years ago. We went with Rocket Mortgage, and they were very easy to work with. Yes, it re-set the clock but I don’t really care because there will still be plenty of equity in the house when I die and in the meantime I have money to spend.
Regarding Wells Fargo: This thread has caused me to try to remember how we came to use them. For one thing, I don’t think their reputation was so bad in 2004. But other than that, I don’t remember. I hadn’t used them as a bank before that, but one of the benefits of having the mortgage meant fee-free checking which I thought was nice. I’m wonder whether (unlike some others in this thread) it wasn’t my agent who steered me that way. Is that likely? Might she have gotten a kickback? She didn’t seem that type of person to me, but I’ve been wrong about people before.
Regarding Wells Fargo: When I was buying my house the agent referred me to a financing agent, and I had opted for the 15-year mortgage because I could afford the slightly higher monthly payment and I wanted to get the mortgage paid off as quickly as possible. I never had any problem with them, including making arrangements after closing to waive the escrow requirement and getting a prompt refund of the amount I had been required to put into it at the closing. At some point I even got a Wells Fargo credit card because they had a cash-back program where the money earned was applied directly to my mortgage balance. When the reports later came out about their questionable practices I was surprised, as I’d always thought highly of them. I guess I got lucky.
We refinanced our old condo 2 years into a 30-year loan; changes in rates meant that we could pay it off in 15 years instead of another 28 by kicking in an extra $100-some a month, and that we’d break even in terms of the cost of refinancing within a year. We sold the condo and bought a house about 5 years later, and it meant we had a good chunk of equity in the condo. Totally worth it, and it also convinced us that we should only buy as much house as we could pay off in 15 years so we don’t have a mortgage when we retire.
There are probably scenarios where we would end up with more money in the long run by putting more into our 401(k)s instead of paying off the house more quickly, but they all involve more risk.
Good luck. I managed to get away from Wells Fargo after a refinance, only to have the new company later sell my mortgage to… Wells Fargo.
I refinanced about 6 years ago with Chase. A total clusterfuck. I hate Chase like many hate Wells Fargo.
Fuck Wells Fargo. I refinanced after paying them on time every time for 10+ years. They demanded everything but a proctology exam.
We refinanced several times. The first time we did it was a month after we bought the house, and all the original paperwork was still good. We broke even on that refinance with our first new payment. The others took longer to break even. 
As others have pointed out, you do need to take into account that by default, you will reset the clock. So you can’t just compare the payments to see if you are doing better.
We weren’t able to negotiate a non-standard loan length (30 years and 15 years are the common standards) but we worked out what the payment would have been if it were a 13.5 year loan (or whatever time we had left) and just paid that much each month. As our mortgage, like most, had no pre-payment penalty, that meant that we effectively DID keep the same end dates. If you aren’t comfortable doing amortization calculations, you could just keep making the same payment as before, and pay off your loan sooner.
An ugly side effect of my refi has been the deluge of junk mail pretending to be from my new mortgageholder but is actually a variety of home warranty/insurance companies trying to scare me into purchasing additional insurance by telling me it’s required when it’s not. These parasites comb public records for newly recorded deeds and sell these sales leads to independent contractors. Today’s was an MLM called Equis Financial; this is the 3rd solicitation they’ve sent me in a week; it’s designed to look like a new PIN mailer from my bank.