Wednesday, 25 January 2012

Options to Consider Before Refinancing Your Mortgage

By Dmitry Vasenyov


There are many reasons which might influence people to think about refinancing their mortgages. A lot of home owners are barely coping with their mortgage payments, finding their budgets stretching to the limit as well as hope that by refinancing they might decrease their monthly burden.

At the same time, other people find that it makes economic sense to move from a higher interest rate to a lower one and therefore they opt for refinancing to cut down their mortgage term and the overall amount of interest rates that are repaid on their loans. Some people want to release equity into cash, to consolidate debts or something else.

Today there are a lot of different considerations which need to be given due through to in each of these various scenarios. People who are presuming that refinancing is the best option to make their budget stretch further or just alleviate financial hardship have to consider some other options before refinancing. Remember that the costs of refinancing are high and if the borrower has some other debts, they are not likely to secure the lower interest rate because the debts will be reflected in their credit score.

The other option to consider is loan modification, which could be done in different ways. If your financial problem is more likely to be short term, then you can ask your lender for a payment holiday for some month and thus putting the mortgage payments on hold. After that the accumulated missed payments are added to the balance of the mortgage and paid off by the extending the mortgage. This option is more cost effective than refinancing and will give you temporary relief when you need it the most.

As well you can ask your lender to reduce the interest rates without refinancing. Of course, they could refuse, but still there is nothing lost by requesting this. As well, borrowers could ask the lender to extend the term of the loan which will reduce the monthly payments, however will mean that more interests are paid in the long term.




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