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.

When we bought our house, our buyer’s agent gave us a number of house warming gifts from his company. One of them was a 75 gallon coupon to the local oil company, provided that you signed on with their automatic delivery program for a minimum of one year. When it came time to prepay for our oil, I discovered that I had misplaced the coupon. A few months go by, and I have no luck finding the coupon and we are beginning to get low on what oil is left. I bit the bullet and called to purchase a few thousand dollars of oil without the benefit of getting 75 gallons of it for free. It turned out however that the window of opportunity for purchasing your oil in advance had passed and we could only get onto a pay as you go plan.

It turns out that losing that coupon saved us a lot of money, because the price of oil was much lower all winter than if we had prepaid. Not only that, but they assured us that if we found the coupon at a later date we could still use it as long as we were using the automatic delivery program. Fast forward to a month ago, and I found the coupon.

I went to oil company in person to redeem the coupon for 75 of the 125 gallons that had been delivered, and then paid the cash price difference for what was left. Our oil company charges a different price for the oil if you pay them on time. I was then a little surprised when a bill arrived for the difference between the cash price we paid plus the free 75 gallons and the full price for the oil. I called them up, we sorted it on the phone, and they took the charge off of our bill as we had not only paid on time, but when I received the bill it was still within 30 days of delivery.

I thought that that would be the end of it, until we got another statement last week. Our balance due was $0, but it showed that we actually had a credit for about the amount that they had over charged us. When I looked over the transaction history, I saw that they had credited us for that one penny less, and then corrected their error by crediting us for the full amount that they were supposed to. They never removed the original charge, though, so it turned into a discount that was about twice as large as it was supposed to be.

Of course, I called them back to inform them of the error. While getting an extra 10 gallons of so of oil for free on our next delivery would have been nice, we didn’t actually deserve it. Had they given me any problems when I tried letting them know about the “problem” then I would not have wasted any more time and would have just accepted the gift. However, they were very thankful that I called them and have supposedly zeroed out our balance so that everything is as it should be.

I just hope that they didn’t make another mistake and that they don’t now show us as owing them money again; not until they make another delivery at least.