We are locked in at 3.75% fixed for our mortgage. With the interest rates going up, people are begging us to refi. My bank has called me a few times. We have $200K in equity and now lenders are offering to let us pull out over $80K cash within a week. Mrs Cad and I have talked about it and yes, cash is always good but why would we borrow on our house at these rates?
Any other homeowners getting a ton of refi offers or is it just us?
I have gotten several, which is crazy as their refi offers are higher than my rate of 2.625%. I would never want to do business with such incompetent companies.
It’s not incompetence, it’s just standard spamming. Fire a shotgun at every email/phone number you can find. The cost of that is nil and even one hit can yield a profit.
I prefer my take.
Basically, I wouldn’t want to do business with spammers like that, but I would rather insult them given the chance. Calling them incompetent is more fun.
The idea that equity is money just waiting to be spent is marginally insane to me. If we had a catastrophic expense hanging over our heads, maybe… but just to have a chunk of cash to play with? Nope. And especially since our current mortgage is under 3%…
Yeah, I don’t see how making you an offer that would be beneficial for them but not for you is “incompetent.” Looks like standard advertising/business practice to me.
And it was in 2008 but that didn’t stop people from getting underwater on their house.
As for @What_Exit it’s not incompetent. It’s the standard practice for credit card companies, those strip mall loan places like OneMain, etc.
We used Lending Tree three years ago and refinanced when rates were insanely low. The calls have recently restarted. We’ve got a very low rate and only nine years left on our term. I don’t see anyone beating what we have now.
I’m impressed by the interest rates you and @What_Exit mentioned. The Bank of America current prime rate is 7% and all their mortgages currently have an APR of well over 6%.
I would hope they’re mainly targeting people who want to cash out some of the equity. I don’t think they can possibly offer rates to compete with the rates practically everyone has by now given how low rates have been for over a decade.
One thing that they probably won’t tell you about cash-out refinances of your home is that the interest on the cash-out portion is not deductible if the proceeds aren’t spent on improving your home. The mortgage interest deduction has only been granted to help people buy and improve their homes, so if you get cash out for other purposes, it’s not deductible.
It’s relatively low, especially compared to, say, direct mail, but it’s not “nil.” (That said, yes, the math likely is that they don’t need many hits to make such a campaign profitable.)
I don’t see how they possibly can, either.
But, I also strongly suspect that the mortgage-origination market (i.e., the guys who are trying to sell you a new mortgage) are getting paid by how many new mortgages they can sell. In this current market, with the double-whammy of high housing prices (which have priced many people out of the home-buying market entirely) and mortgage rates being as high as they’ve been in 20 years, there’s
less demand from people buying houses, and probably very little demand from anyone looking to refinance an existing mortgage.
So, those companies are getting desperate.
(Article updated Sep 13, 2022)
500,000 emails/mo for $45-379
Seems pretty close to nil compared to other costs of running an office or branch.
There are three primary things you need to conduct an email marketing campaign:
All three of those, of course, require some level of investment.
From what I can see, the services in that link only provide #3. For #2, if you don’t already have a list of either current customers or prospective customers, you need to buy a mailing list from another third-party vendor.
They can’t match our current interest rates. Some are encouraging us to pull cash out and some are just desperate.
We paid cash for our home, no financing involved. Those guys love us, they want us to put a mortgage on our home because reasons.
I keep telling hubs that we need a garbage can by our mailbox.
I remember this kind of crap happening in 2007. In one case they convinced an elderly lady with no mortgage to take out one on her house, with horrible results.
I paid off my mortgage so I’m not getting any calls, but I’m surprised I’m not. Maybe they respect the do not call list.
We haven’t in a while - but we happened to refinance in spring of 2021, at an insanely low rate (2.75, I think, for 20 years).
We got a call from the lender, about 6 months later, trying to make us think that it’d be a WONDERFUL idea for us to refinance. I forget what the deal was, but I think it was cash out - and variable rate. The call was from someone in their “retention department”, which is laughable. Basically they’d sold the loan (as we were told would happen), and this would have generated more income for them via fees etc.
During a refinance years ago (we initially financed this house at about 7.5%, 20 years ago, and refinanced at least 4 times) they wanted to set us up with a HELOC at the same time. IIRC, it would be set up for, say, 50K initially - and the limit would increase as the primary loan got paid down. A good way to guarantee we’d NEVER get rid of the debt.
We have Rocket Mortgage, they are great - I would highly recommend them, except about every six months, their sales department will call with an exciting new deal.
I’ve had to tell at least three different people that the only way we’ll refinance is if they can lower our rate (not bloody likely - we last refied when prime was insanely low), lower our monthly payment, AND reduce our term. Seeing as how we have about six or seven years left, I don’t see any of that happening.
My car is almost paid off but I’d like to see them beat 0.0%