Re-financing
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| Fri, 03-27-2009 - 11:02am |
I called someone yesterday about doing a refiance on my home. We have a fixed 30 year loan at 5.75%. I know loans are down now to 5% or even lower. If this can save us a few hundred a month I am all for it.
I called a mortgage person on a recommendation and talked stuff out with her. She said we would need an appraisal. This just busts my chops.
Let me vent for a second. We bought our townhome for $181,000. We put $10,000 down and financed $171,000. We currently owe $158,000. It's a 3 bedroom, two and 1/2 baths and full basement (not finished) and a two car attached garage. Nice home and I love it.
We have about 7 homes in our subdivision of about 110 that are in foreclosure. Some are the same models as my home and they are selling for $145,000.
If they do an appraisal I am sure my home won't be valued at what we need to do a re-fi. I just feel screwed here. I DO pay my mortgage ON time each month and these houses in foreclosure are screwing us.
I am NOT knocking people who have gone through foreclosure. I cannot imagine the stress involved but it gets me that hard working people that DO pay their mortgage on time might not be able to take advantage of a perk like a lower interest rate because of all the foreclosed homes bringing down our property value.
Sorry, needed to vent. Thanks for listening.

Yeah,
Norma
"Patience is the best remedy for every trouble"- Plautus
Just wanted to note that appraisals are conducted for various purposes.
I agree that appraisals are very subjective. Often they miraculously come up with the exact number the lender needs them to be. That has worked both to our advantage and disadvantage before, usually advantage. But sure enough once when a lender was trying to get out of a low rate offer that had been previously promised they said our house did not appraise high enough. When I protested they hadn't even seen the house he actually ordered a second appraisal and his appraiser was in our house all of two minutes and gave the very low ball number the bank needed to turn us down. (we sold the house less than a year later and it sold for $175K more than the "appraisals")
More recently we tried to refinance our current house since we have a 6.25 ARM. Our issue is they won't count my self employment until I have been out on my own for two years. That means they are going only on my husband's income and said we had too much debt to our income. Fair enough. We do have a lot. But at first the lender came up with a proposal where we would refinance to a 30 year fixed low rate loan if we took some money out to pay down debt to lower our debt to income ratio. The catch was we would have to pay more than $6K in points and loan orgination fees which we said was unacceptable. When I asked if we could do the same deal without paying the point even if it meant paying a higher interest rate the banker said no. She pulled out the old appraisal escape clause saying she was sure our house would not appraise high enough. This was two days after she said the appraisal would be no problem. BUt of course that was when we would be paying huge fees. Moral of the story: get more than one opinion.
Jenny
Can I give you some friendly advice.
I had to stop looking my property up because I was sick of the price being less than what I purchased my property for. And it does stink if there are alot of foreclosures in the neighborhood because this actual brings the value of your house down.
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