Mortgage Rates

Routine Care Task

Evaluate refinancing your mortgage

Re-financing can potentially save you interest costs for your mortgage, or provide you with financing that better fits your home financial situation.

Priority

Timing: February (yearly)

NOTE: The tasks and timings shown here for your Mortgage Rates are based on a single-family home located in Massachusetts with a default set of home care goals and priorities.

If you setup your Home-Wizard personal home manager for a different location with different home care goals, your recommended home care program can have different tasks and timings for your {home feature}.

How To

To evaluate re-financing your mortgage, start by examining your current mortgage document. Look particularly for:

- the amount mortgaged

- interest rate

- rate adjustment features

- any penalties for early pay-off of your mortgage

- the length of the term of the mortgage

Next, look at your payment statements to see how much remaining principle you still owe.

Then contact various financial institutions and request quotes for re-financing your mortgage. If rates have dropped sufficiently, you may find that your mortgage payment could go down, and more than off-set the transaction cost of the re-financing (e.g. the "closing costs").

Benefits

The benefits of this task are are potentially high, depending on how much the market for mortgage rates have dropped since you set up your current mortgage.

Saving Money (beyond energy)

Costs

The cost of this task is moderately low, from an investment of time standpoint. It is estimated that this task should take about 1-2 hours to complete the necessary research.