It’s been over a year since we bought the house, and thoughts of refinancing have been swimming through my head. I started shopping around to see if it made sense to refinance after Nickel was trying to decide when to refinance a mortgage. He had an opportunity to pay some closing costs and get a low interest rate, or take a slightly higher interest rate and avoid the closing costs of the refinance. He had not quite decided what to do and had more thoughts about refinancing which further developed the idea.

I don’t think that refinancing is quite going to work in our favor yet. We are well ahead of where we should be on paying down our loan, but I don’t think that we have paid it down quite enough yet. I think that once we have paid another $6000 towards the principle it will be worth trying to reexamine our refinancing options, since we still have a little less than 20% equity. We had gotten a split loan with the bulk of the loan at 6.25%, which we have been paying down on the 30 year fixed schedule. A small piece of the loan covered about 4% of the total loan price and came with a heavier price tag over 7%. We have paid down about a third of that loan already.

Getting back to Five Cent Nickel’s site, though, I recommend that you head over for a visit. I have been following three of his websites for most of the last two years, and he is having a two year anniversary celebration and giving away some prizes. You should at least leave a comment there and see if you can’t lessen my chances of winning an envelope full of bricks! He’s also giving away iPods and fun things of that nature.

Our property tax bill has arrived, and not surprisingly we do not have the cash in our checking account to pay it. Not that that is anything to worry about; it is what the escrow account that is bundled into our mortgage is for. Every month, our mortgage is divvied up into principal, interest, and escrow payments; the escrow payments are for insurance premiums and property taxes.

I am not sure if I need to do anything to get that money out of escrow, however, or whether the bank where our mortgage is held takes care of it. I have been meaning to call them and ask all week, but I have not had an opportunity to do it yet. I am going to try to remember to call tomorrow to find out what I need to do in order to get our tax bill paid. We still have nearly a month, so I am not too worried about it yet.

Our search for a mortgage broker began with a recommendation from our real estate agent. We spent most of our time with this gentleman, but he never really seemed to listen to us or to work within the parameters of what we were trying to do. He seemed more interested in the easier (read: higher commission) way of getting us under contract.

In the end, we had a mad dash in the last few weeks where we switched over to a friend of ours that was able to offer us a much better deal. If we do not pay anything early, then we’d save about $12,000, and needed about $500 less up front. Spending the extra $100 or so a month towards principal will mean that we save even more than that.
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