Now I certainly don't do loans, nor do I get paid to refer clients to lenders (that is illegal)...but what I do want to see is banks getting LESS MONEY and homeowners keeping MORE!
Rates are still insanely low. See below.
One of the biggest ways you can save money is with a better rate. Now there are some negatives to refinancing...the cost of doing the new loan is one of them. There are a lot of lenders now though that are doing no cost refinances, slightly higher interest rate but still better than what a lot of people have.
The other drawback is that you have to start the loan term over. Now if your loan is only a couple years in, that is not such a big deal. But if you have been paying it down for say, 5 years or more, you need to do a true cost-benefit analysis to see if it makes sense in the long run. Because at the beginning of a loan, you pay almost all interest, and is it goes farther on down the timeline, you pay less and less interest progressively. There are simple loan calculators on most mortgage websites (see www.bankrate.com for instance) that can easily do the math for you.
Generally the rule of thumb has always been that if you can get 1% or more off your rate it makes sense to refi. I tend to agree with that. Although I will say that my wife and I are strongly considering refinancing our 4% rate which we just started last December down to 3.5% for the long run.
See below for the current rates, as of July 17th, 2012. Bye bye!
| Product | Rate | +/- | Last week | |
| 30 yr fixed mtg | 3.64% |  |
3.63% | |
| 15 yr fixed mtg | 3.02% | |
3.01% | |
| 5/1 ARM | 2.71% | |
2.69% |
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