Hey, everybody, if you are a homeowner in Cherokee County, Georgia, and you keep asking yourself, ” Should I refinance my house right now?”, then stay tuned, I’m going to try and explain to you the whole process and the benefits of it.
Hopefully, everybody by now knows and has seen that interest rates are at historical lows, right? As a matter of fact, they’re lowest than they’ve ever been in the history of the United States, so is it a good idea to refinance? I don’t know, I’m going to try and answer a couple of those questions for you. So one of the things that we always consult with our folks first when they look at refinancing or taking advantage of the low rates by selling their existing house here in Cherokee County and possibly buying a new one, and taking advantage of that opportunity, is we always talk to them about what their goal is.
One of the many goals that a lot of people have is they just want to lower their rates, right? And lower their payments, or maybe what they want to do is they want to sell their house that they’re currently in because it doesn’t quite fit their lifestyle any longer, and take advantage of those low rates and get into a house that they can see themselves in a little bit longer, a longer-term. So what we really do is we just sit down and find out exactly what their needs are and what their goals are. We then determine if the current rates and the structure of those loans will actually support what they are trying to do from a monthly expense standpoint. And then obviously making sure that the property is going to fill the needs that their new lifestyle or the changes in their lifestyle are actually going to fit, right? So we just want to make sure that their goals are in line with actually doing the refinance or the purchase. Now there’s a lot of different products out there. There’s conventional financing, you’ve probably heard of, there are adjustable-rate mortgages, there are VA loans, there are all kinds of different products. So we have to look at every one of those, ’cause all of them are a little bit different, and we have to find out which one is going to best fit their needs.
Now, we obviously work directly with a handful of lenders that are going to be able to assist us and be able to provide the details behind each one of those products. We, as realtors, don’t typically do that, we rely on one of our partners to work with our clients to actually determine those things. One of the first things that your lender’s going to do when you are going to refinance your home is they’re going to take a look at your credit score. A credit score is going to have a large impact on what kind of interest rate that you’re going to be able to obtain. Now, interesting, we find a lot of our clients where we’ll run a credit report, and they find debts that they have on their credit score that they were unaware of, or maybe are incorrect. So it’s always a great idea that you actually run your own personal report, to begin with, to make sure that everything that’s on that report is accurate. If it is not, there is a way that you can dispute those debts or charges in your report and you’re going to want to get those cleaned up before you actually move forward with working directly with a lender. And a lot of lenders will actually help you through that whole process, but you’re definitely going to want to get that cleaned up and taken care of first.
All right, so the second thing you want to take a look at when you refinance your home is how much equity you have in your house. Equity is the difference between how much your house is worth and how much you owe, or your mortgage balance. An agent right here in Cherokee County or Townsend Realty Group, we can help you figure out what that equity is, but that’s going to be a key piece ’cause that tells the bank just how risky you are as a borrower. The more equity you have, usually the better because it’s less risk for the bank and then they’ll give you a better rate. If you have not yet built up to a 20% equity in your home, you’re most likely going to have an additional cost, which is an insurance policy that basically goes in place. It’s called mortgage insurance, and that’s just an additional cost, or some people call it PMI, you might have that already, you may not, but anyway, it’s another layer expense if you don’t have that 20%. So really you need to determine if you have 20% equity already built up, which is going to make a huge difference in your monthly payment as well.
The third thing we always tell people thinking about “Should I refinance my house right now” is to shop around for lenders. Although the borrowing of money that the lenders usually get, all their money from the government, let’s face it, typically it’s usually from the government, they borrow the money at the same rate, money is money. However, the fees that they charge you are going to be different from lender to lender. So we highly encourage everybody to shop lenders, to make sure and negotiate with them. There is negotiating power, you can negotiate some of the fees that they charge you, but definitely shop lenders. The other thing, besides just pure fees that you need to take a look at with lenders, is their service. When you venture down the path of refinancing or buying a new home, we always prepare our folks, listen, you’re going to have 20 days of grueling activities, it’s just the way it is, that’s the way the lending world is. If you don’t have a great lender on the backside working with you, that’s reachable, that you can get in contact with, you’re not constantly going into voicemail or they only communicate through email, it’s going to be grueling. So that’s really a personal decision you have to make, but we really emphasize in the fact that you need to have someone that’s an advocate for you, that can easily be reached, can be reached on the weekends, maybe even evenings, because it is going to be 20 days of a grueling process for you. So make sure that you shop your rates and you also really look at your lenders as far as what service, what level of service they provide. And then the final thing is after you compile all this, we got to run the numbers.
Now we help our clients all the time, put everything together, and run the numbers to make sure that everything is in line with what your original goal was. We don’t want any gotchas later down the road, we don’t want to get you in a situation where it’s costing you more than what you’re currently at, that’s just counterproductive to what you’re trying to achieve. So you really are going to need someone, a lender and an agent, kind of working together to help run the numbers, we call it running the numbers, let’s run the numbers and find out exactly where you’re at. So, give us a thumbs up if this was helpful and answered your question ” should I refinance my house right now?“, reach out to us if you have any questions, and make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel. Thanks for listening.
WE’RE READY TO HELP YOU BUY OR SELL YOUR Atlanta HOME AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND AT THE BEST PRICE POSSIBLE. TO DISCOVER MORE, CONTACT US BY PHONE AT 770-280-4560 OR FILL OUT OUR ONLINE FORM.
