Family Finance Help

Refinancing your mortgage can be one of the best financial decisions you make depending on how frequently you do this, the purpose of your refinance and the refinance product you decide to go with. You’ll need to put your trust in another individual (usually your loan officer that works with a brokerage or a loan specialist with a bank) that will help you with the process of getting refinanced. Because you’ll need to trust someone that will act in your best interest, the following are a few tips so that you’ll be a little educated on the basic refinance process and a few “gotchas” about the mortgage industry.

The first tip is to get pre-approved with multiple lenders. What this will do is allow the price comparison to be more vast and give you more options. If nothing else, this will give you the opportunity to have multiple rates and products to compare. Working with a good loan officer will also enable you to access multiple lenders as most loan officers or mortgage brokerages have relationships with multiple lenders.

Most lenders will have a prepayment penalty. This second tip is to make sure you know what the prepayment penalty is on your current loan before you spend the time shopping for a new lender. If you have a large prepayment, it may offset any benefit from the refinance. You may still end up with a lower rate, but knowing if you have a prepayment penalty and what it is should be a priority. Most lenders typically have a 120 to 180 day prepayment penalty. This insures that even if you refinance after only 120 days, they’ll still have had an opportunity to cover their costs and make some profit while they’ve held onto the loan. Some lenders do have a 90 day prepayment policy. This information is great to know also both from your existing provider as well as the lender you’re about to sign with so that you know when you can next refinance in the event that rates are good or there is another cause for refinancing.

This third tip can save you significant money, especially in the long run. There are two types of homeowners, at least two types I’ll categorize here. The first is the temporary homeowner. Whether this is a first time homebuyer that may only be in the home for a year or two, or someone who will most likely move or relocate well before the mortgage is paid off. The other is the “lifer”. This is the homeowner that is in their home for the long haul and isn’t going anywhere. Both of these types of homeowners can refinance and most do based on lowering rates, cash out refinances, and other reasons. The goal of the “lifer” apart from taking cash out of their home in an cash-out refinance to get at the equity of the home, is usually to get their rates as low as possible. The lower the rate, the less they’ll pay in the long run. This may mean that if they “buy down” their rate where they pay cash up front in exchange for a lower rate may be a good idea as the savings over the life of the loan will be significant. The temporary homeowner instead of trying to buy down the rate may consider it a better option to pay as little as possible up front to affect less their overall cash flow or access to cash. The best thing to do is find a good loan officer who can take your individual scenario and give you several options including the monthly costs and one time fees of each option.

Also, if you don’t know how long you’re going to be in a home, whether there for a shorter amount of time, or have plans to “upgrade” to a new neighborhood within a few years, buying down the rate may not be the very best option. You may have more success financially if you focus on keeping your monthly cash outlay to a minimum and reduce the amount of capital required to close the loan. There are many good loan officers that will help you determine which program is the best for you. For instance, if you spend $3,000 to buy down the rate from a 5% to a 4.5%, you may save $30,000 over the life of the loan if, and only if, you keep that loan for the full 30 years (assuming a 30 year fixed mortgage). There is a break even where when you spend $3000, your break even may be 3 years or 4 years. A point in time when the buy down of the rate ends up being a better value to you than if you were to not buy down the rate at all. The same may be true for paying a higher rate to cover all of the closing costs through a no-cost refinance. Evaluate this with a good loan officer and you’ll have an idea about what would be the best thing to do with your loan officer.

The fourth tip is to reserve the credit check for the loan officer and broker you decide to go with. This shouldn’t matter too much as the credit bureaus made some changes with how multiple inquiries within the same period of time affects overall credit score. The answer is that the credit adjusts as if it were only one inquiry. Also, to keep an eye on your own credit, you have the option to get a free credit report from each agency once per year. What this means is that if you request your credit report every 4 months, you’ll have a good chance of seeing not only what is on it, but your score as well. The three agencies are Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax.

Loan officers and mortgage brokers get paid one of two ways, either up front by charging you directly (like in the case of loan origination fees) or in the case of a “back-end” payout from the lender also known as yield spread premium. This is a compensation from the lender to the loan officer for selling the loan at a higher rate than the “par” rate. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it does allow for a no-cost refinance. What makes it bad is the fact that it is usually unknown to the borrowers. If they don’t ask about it or know about it, there is a possibility that the loan officer is offering a rate above what the industry would consider fair compensation for the work that is done. Asking your loan officer what the par rate is and how they are being compensated is a fair question. Although you won’t necessarily know the actual par rate, expect that a refinance may earn the loan officer somewhere around $800 to $2000 depending on the loan amount. For this industry, those may be just fine. If your loan officer won’t answer that question directly, you may look for a second opinion.

The main points to take away from this article are that you can save a lot of money if you’re aware of the numbers involved and have a basic understanding of how mortgages work. If nothing else, you can use this information to help you identify a good mortgage broker or loan officer from a loan officer that does not have your best interests in mind. Refinancing doesn’t have to be difficult, but expect to put some work in to this as your home is typically your most expensive purchase and is worth a little caution when dealing with the financial side of home ownership.