This was a day. First, we decided to refi the house—if you’re a homeowner with loans handled by Freddy Mac or Fannie Mae, with interest in the 5’s or higher, there are some special provisions that let you do some revision of your interest rate, ie, lower it, which can lower your monthly house payment; and if you are in the 5’s, it would be well to talk this over with your mortgage company and keep your eye on the rates. Basically they wave their hands over it, you get a couple of upfront charges which can be folded back into the loan, but because they’ve already got the mortgage, if you can accept their valuation, based on statistics, you and they can come to a new agreement and you don’t pay a dime out of pocket. If we get what we’re aiming at, it’ll save us about 40.00 a month.
The catch came when they intended to run a credit check—remember when Oklahoma decided I’m an oil baron instead of a writer (only oil wells have royalties, right? Yeah.) Well, this has somewhat impacted my rating, because the mistaken lien was filed in May, but the letter from the state saying “Ooopsie, oopsie! our bad!” didn’t get filed until August. So…any credit reporting done based on A, may not have gotten B yet. But we think we’ll still squeak through, though it may cost us a bit. I hate mindless clerical screwups that just mess up records and take forever to mop up.
And Jane and I went to eat at our favorite Chinese place and it had mutated. Everything had onion in it and so far I’m on two drugs, dunno how Jane’s doing on that score, and we had to cut our shopping trip short.
But…because I was under the weather from lunch, I went to bed for a while. Now Sei’s sort of lived under the bureau. But after a little bribe of kibble in a dish in my room (oh, we have NO principles)—he decided after several tries that the middle of my bed was a good place for a nap. It was very nice, even if he did keep the center of the bed. What do you expect? He’s a cat.
Well, of course. What did you expect? You’re merely staff.
I wish it were that easy. DH and I attempted to get a refi at the end of 2009; we had gotten a small second mortgage and wanted to roll it in with our original. Our mortgage started with Countrywide and then was sold to BofA. The thing that shot us down was the appraisal. Despite living in one of the few areas in the US where house prices have more or less remained stable, our appraiser dinged us for not having gutted the house and upgraded everything. I am doing some remodeling, but on my own schedule, and I LIKE some of the things she called ‘dated’, like the real redwood paneling. Needless to say, the house didn’t make the cut for a refi, despite our nearly flawless credit record. This was before the banks began to strangle the refi market; presently, I doubt we could get one on terms better than our present mortgage(s). De gustibus non est disputandum, but really!
Yep, we were there with our OKC lake house—they made me sign a special paper about the dining room with gold/bamboo wallpaper and formal gold drapes surrounding 3 diagonal window sets overlooking the family room whose big windows overlooked the lake: beautiful view. They said that it constituted impaired access, because the dining room exit went through the kitchen or into the sitting room. Well, yeah, I’m going to remove those windows and make it a door? OR expose the family room to whoever, if I don’t CHOOSE to invite them to the family room. Idiots. And I sold it that way to somebody else who liked that view. THough by then the wallpaper was coming apart, so we had to remove that.
The current house is pretty ordinary in that regard, but if you don’t like ponds or actual color on the walls you’re in for a shock, too.
I ask about refinancing every so often, but what keeps me from doing it is the LTV. The good news is that the market is starting to stabilize around where I live, the bad news is that it was a seriously declining market for a while there. Since my equity is less than 20% due to the decline in values, I can’t do a streamline refi, and would have to pay around 6K to get the new interest rate, AND pick up PMI, which I would have to have for a minimum of two years, to save $25 a month. If I didn’t have to have the PMI, it would be worth it, but for now I will take the bigger tax deduction on the higher interest rate.
we don’t get tax reductions on mortgages any more in the UK – that went out of the window at least a decade ago … I have a tracker, so it’s pretty low at the moment. in fact I had paid my mortgage off, but I took out a small one to pay back in 5 years for the swimming pond in Spain. not a good idea as it turned out – neither the financial aspect – I had thought the holiday lets would cover it, but they haven’t, not at all … nor the pond, which is much too big and the runaway evaporation is more than my borehole can keep up with, and the dust from the dry and surroundings, and the pollen from all the olive trees and home oaks keeps it far too dirty. you need to have one in a nice neat urban area with tidy gardens, I think! a bit of a disaster. I am off this morning on my 3 day trek to stay there for a month with my dogs … we have to make some tough decisions about this pond. getting rid of the most shallow areas for a start, which means losing the skimmers, but using a surface skimmer that floats around instead. the skimmers don’t work properly anyway because the flow across the surface is totally blocked by large areas of waterlily. who ever thought that would work?! plus we have had 6 weeks of booked continentals who couldn’t possibly swim in it, a live frog might jump them! or possibly a grass snake …. so much for my Big Idea.
Well, we’d put down enough downpayment (equity saved from the last house)—to get the house payment down into range; and of course with the decline of house values nationwide, we got seriously hammered, but not completely devastated, and are not, as they say, ‘underwater’. We still have enough wiggle in the situation to fit the ‘straight rollover into a new mortgage’ provision in what Freddy Mac is doing, with no appraisal, no points, just an origination charge and a couple of other fees, which would work out to lower our payment and fix us at a ‘new’ valuation. The better news is that the market in Spokane seems to have bottomed out and is now starting to rise, which could mean we actually recover our former value—Spokane had some inflated values, before the crash, but not a lot, and not so much in our neighborhood, which is urban, within a mile or so of downtown, and more full of people like us, who enjoy fixing-up and prefer a house with eclectic style and some age on it. Since we have no plans to move, and would ultimately like to pay this place off, we’d be good with that. We’ve put down serious roots here, and have really made this place ours.
So we really hope this works. If it does, we may start plowing what we save back into a direct paydown of the mortgage debt, which on a 30 year mortgage can really save a lot. Since I never believe that a financial institution is acting in any way that will hurt their interests, I am satisfied to understand that Freddy Mac is profiting from this in a modest way. What Freddy Mac gets out of the deal is that our interest/debt pyramid is actually started afresh, so that the proportion of interest paid rises, but if we use it to whittle down the actual debt, it works out for us. [Any of you who may be ‘underwater’, consult your bank financial advisor: there is some special but temporary provision in current law for assisting ‘underwater’ mortgages whose person has kept up payments.]
“We’ve put down serious roots here, and have really made this place ours.”
^^^^LIKE!
My girl friend’s mortgage is down in the 3% range since her refi. She has a lot of equity plus over the past few years we’ve done a lot of work on the house and her appraisal came in at an over 50% increase in value since she bought it 10 years ago. Not bad in the Bay Area market. The bank fell over itself giving her a loan.
Phil Brown
We just refinanced two weeks ago, for the second time this year. We’re one of the few, lucky “serial refinancers” because our credit rating is excellent and we have equity in the house rather than being under water with the valuation versus how much owed. We had refinanced down to a 15 year mortgage last winter but just refinanced to the same interest rate (4%) at 30 years. Roughly speaking, if we keep up our 15 year payment amount at the 30 year rate, we should pay down the principle enough to pretty much pay this mortgage off in the same 15 years (which equals the same 30 year original time frame as when we bought the house) but if I lose my job or something, we have the dramatically lower actual mortgage amount to fall back on.
(I do anti-foreclosure advocacy in my day job: the folks who really need to refinance to drop their monthly payments are screwed because they are “underwater” and owe more than the house is currently worth. Those of us who don’t need to refinance but find it nicely advantageous can.)
On the expensive but positive kitty news: Froggie Cat is back from three days at the vet and one really serious bladder & kidney infection. The treatment, tests and meds he is on now at home (a IV infusion of antibiotic once a day among the lot: oh joy but the first infusion went basically ok) are almost equal to the one month skipping of a mortgage payment you get when you refi. He’s eating, drinking and peeing again and was thrilled to be able to sleep under my quilt on my stomach last night: I could feel the purrs. I was pretty happy too, I must say. Mao-Tse kitten is wearing a cone of confusion around his neck because he is repeatedly scratching raw a small cut he got under his chin and we refuse to let him look like a zombie for Halloween.
Lol! The kitten may be picking up tension re Froggie, and will now get better, perhaps shedding his cone of confusion!
Yep, we missed the 4%, in fact only inquired casually expecting an ‘it won’t work,’ but it turns out it does, so we are now theoretically locked in and credited and just seeing if we can get the deal we’d like from Freddie Mac or if we need to get an appraisal.
“I hate mindless clerical screwups that just mess up records and take forever to mop up.”
Oh, yeah. I was on unemployment this year, until I was accused of being fully employed as a male welder in Vallejo. Since I am a female writer in Santa Cruz, I found this involuntary sex change by the bureaucracy a bit hard to deal with. (I thought the skills were cool.) Anyway, that little one-digit-off Social Security number took three months to straighten out.
By sheer dumb persistence and some luck, we paid off our house in 2005 and we’ve managed to sit this crisis out. Before that, we were refinancing and negotiating loans every year or so because we bought in 1992 at over 12%. I remember when rates were pushing 20%.
Oh, yeah! I didn’t participate in the 20% madness: I was 8.5 at the time, but doing the math to figure out how much you actually would pay for a 100,000 house over 30 years is pretty scary.
Male welder, eh? That’s as good as me the oil baron.
I am pondering your phrasing about the Seishi being “in the middle of the bed”. That makes it sound like you have known cats, or at least cat-like creatures, that deigned to sleep somewhere that is not the middle of the bed. I have yet to meet such an elusive and rare creature, and would love to hear more about this strange beast.
Rana-cat insists on sleeping either on my hip or between my legs, which puts her square in the middle of the bed. I have been known to carefully crawl to the top of the bed, switch slides, and then carefully slide me legs back down around her, so as to not disturb her while she is sleeping!
Yep. I know that maneuver. 😉
CJ, I was just poking around on Barnes & Noble on-line and typed in “Cherryh” to see if anything had come out or was soon to come out. Instead, about five or so rather odd combo compilations of various of your works appeared at a cheap price (~12.00) published by a Hephaestus Books. Is this legit? Your regular novels didn’t come up until some ways down. If it is legit, pardon for raising an alarm. If it is not and also not known by you, then hope this is helpful.
(p.s. as I type this, Froggie Cat is trying to curl up on the narrow wedge of lap between me and the desk, purring at the pleasure of body warmth. He is doing much, much better after his sojourn to the vet and we are really grateful that we have been given (well, paid copiously for) a second chance at patting and loving him. Seems too few of us have been these days with our ill pets.)
No, no, NO!!!!!111!!! It is the return of those jackasses who compile a bunch of Wikipedia articles and sell them to the unsuspecting under the guise of an omnibus. I investigated a little farther down the page: no ISBN number. 40 pp. It’s a scam, quite simply, and CJ will have to smite them with a frozen fish once again to make them take down something that purports to be her work.
Just a quick note. This is the mortgage calculator I use. http://www.drcalculator.com/mortgage/
I leave the annual inflation blank, but go there every month just to cheer as my mortgage drops. The payment amount is within a few cents of my actual payment (not including taxes and insurance). By looking at the current balance and the month that I should be at, I get an idea how much I’ve saved in interest by paying extra every month. Yes, I’m bragging. It will be paid off next Spring after 20 years including a refinance and putting replacement windows and siding on the house.
Heh my mortgage was sorted over a year ago. It’s an offset arrangement so that savings reduce the capital before they calculate the interest. Anyway by last year I had more savings than capital so took the plunge and paid most of it off. I know owe them less than £500. I’ll keep that on the books because it saves having to pay an application fee and maybe it annoys the hell out of them (money being debt and all that).
Unfortunately I made the mistake of joking to someone that I hadn’t had a cold in over two years last week. Guess what – I caught one just in time to ruin my weekend. Karma can be sod :-/