After weeks of faxing paperwork and digging up old returns and scheduling appraisers and dealing with credit agencies, the notary finally came by today and we signed off on our refinancing. Yeah! Our new rate is locked in and now our monthly mortgage payment is cut in half! Whew.
I was talking to my insurance company last week (someone hit my Jeep and left), and the woman mentioned that they also offer financial services. Would I like a home equity loan at 4%? Hm… I got my mortgage at 5-3/8% six years ago. Could I get a 4% home equity loan to pay off the house? ‘Yes!’ That started some wheels turning. I don’t know if I’ll pursue it. Including the downpayment, I’ve paid about 34.5% of the purchase price of the house. So I only have about half the equity I need to pay it off with a loan. OTOH, housing prices were rocketing for a while, and my house may have been worth 200% of what I bought it for. With the decline in the housing market, I might still have just enough equity to cover refinancing through a home equity loan (assuming that ‘equity’ is the value of the house minus the amount owed – I don’t really know).
Anyway, congratulations on your refinancing!
Congrats. I’m planning on doing the same, and likely will start the work this week.
We’re in the middle of the same process, but not to reduce the payment. Rather, we’re knocking 10 years off our loan. We’ve got 25 years to go, but we’re refinancing for 15. Our payment is only going up about $250 a month and we’ll be out from under it all in 2025 instead of some time shortly before death… 
Best of all, we won’t be with the evil, nasssssty BoA any longer. I’m tired of them yanking me around and not responding to my email queries and having the longest “push 1 for loans, push 2 for credit cards, push and\y damn number you want - we don’t want to talk to you anyway…” Yes, I’m just a little bitter.
Well, getting rid of BofA is always a good thing… but mightn’t it be cheaper to just pay the 250 a month extra on the current loan and skip all the extra closing costs? Doubtless you’ve run the numbers already.
We refinanced not quite a year ago when rates were first dropping. Took the bank something like 10 weeks start to finish - they were really slow, and we ran into assorted issues along the way including being told contradictory things by different people. Argh. OTOH, it did shave 350 a month off our payment. If we had sufficient cash flow to continue making our old payment amount, that’d be even better (then we’d be paid off faster) but at least in the meantime we have the lower payment while we work on paying off some other stuff.
No, it’s not just the extra money - it’s a much lower rate. Dumping BoA is just the icing on the mortgage cake!
We did a refi some years ago that knocked $100K off the interest due. We also reduced the term to 15 years and were able to pay off early. It’s a good move.