Have a mortgage? Consider refinancing.

Nic and I are working on refinancing our mortgage, we had an appraiser come out this morning. Our entire house is (well was) clean for the first time in at least 5 months!! An amazing feeling and almost makes me want to clean more, almost. Speaking of 5 months, here is our little guy on his 5 month birthday. He is full of smiles and baby talk these days. His new thing is rolling on his back from side to side. His hands are constantly in his mouth and he loves to observe what is going on around him. He tends to look around to find the person that is talking, sometimes when I am holding him and talking to Nic across the room he will turn his head and peer up at me. It's adorable.

Anyway, I wanted to share a little bit about our mortgage situation in case it could help someone else. Everyone has a different fact pattern, but here is ours. Refinancing your mortgage is worth looking into, you may be able to save yourself LOTS of money down the road.

We bought our home in 2010, entered into a 30 year mortgage with a 4.75% interest rate. If we made minimum payments over the next 30 years we would have paid over double the amount of our loan. For example, if our loan was $200,000, by the end of 30 years we would have paid over $400,000. I understand that borrowing money is expensive, but my goodness paying double the loan amount. Just hurts.

So, we looked into refinancing. We ended up with a new loan for 15 years with a 2.75% interest rate. The total interest or cost of the loan was cut by 75%. Our loan amount is smaller (since we've been paying on it for three years), we shortened the time on the loan (30 years down to 15 years), and we got a significantly lower interest rate. The kicker, our minimum payments stayed flat under the new loan. We will end up saving over $100,000! It's incredible!

Prior to refinancing (and pre-baby), we had been intentional about paying off our mortgage, however now with a 2.75% interest rate on our mortgage we plan to take any "extra money" that we'd want to put toward the loan and invest it. Once the invested money reaches the loan amount, we plan to make a lump sum payment. It will be an amazing day when we fully own a home.

If you have a mortgage, look into refinancing.