vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
If you're truly ready to pay an extra $1000 every month, and are confident you'll likely always be able to, you should refinance to a 15 year mortgage. 15 year mortgages are typically sold at around a half a point lower interest rates, meaning that instead of your 4.375% APR, you'll get something like 3.875% APR.  That's a lot of money over the course of the mortgage.  You'll end up paying around a thousand a month more - so, exactly what you're thinking of doing - and not only save money from that earlier payment, but also have a lower interest rate.  That 0.5% means something like $25k less over the life of the mortgage.  It's also the difference in about $130 or so a month in your required payment. Now of course you'll be locked into making that larger payment - so the difference between what you're suggesting and this is that you're paying an extra $25k in exchange for the ability to pay it off more slowly (in which case you'd also pay more interest, obviously, but in the best case scenario).  In the 15 year scenario you must make those ~$4000 payments.  In the 30 year scenario you can pay ~$2900 for a while if you lose your job or want to go on vacation or ... whatever. Of course, the reverse is also true: you'll have to make the payments, so you will.  Many people find enforced savings to be a good strategy (myself among them); I have a 15 year mortgage and am happy that I have to make the higher payment, because it means I can't spend that extra money frivolously. So what I'd do if I were you is shop around for a 15 year refi.  It'll cost a few grand, so don't take one unless you can save at least half a point, but if you can, do.
"New car loans, used car loans, and refinances have different rates because they have different risks associated with them, different levels of ability to recoup losses if there is a default, and different customer profiles.  (I'm assuming third party lender for all of these questions, not financing the dealer arranges, as that has other considerations built into it.) A new car loan is both safer to some extent (as the car is a ""known"" risk, having no risk of damage/etc. prior to purchase), but also harder to recoup losses (because new cars immediately devalue significantly, while used cars keep more of their value).  Thus the APRs are a little different; in general for the same amount a new car will be a bit lower APR, but of course used car loans are typically lower amounts. Refinance is also different; customer profile wise, the customer who is refinancing in these times is likely someone who is a higher risk (as why are they asking for a loan when they're mostly paid off their car?).  Otherwise it's fairly similar to a used car, though probably a bit newer than the average used car."
If you are a subprime borrower, that may not be an unreasonable rate given the risk they are accepting. In any case, it's what you agreed to. As others have said, you could/should have shopped elsewhere for the loan. In fact, you can still shop elsewhere for a loan to refinance that vehicle and thus lower the rate, unless the existing loan has equally obnoxious rules about that.
Start the process by contacting the company that services the mortgage. They can answer all your questions. They should have a form that needs to be submitted. You will want to get from them the most up-to-date payoff amount X days from now. The amount changes each day. They will be sending you a document signifying that the debt has been met. They will also be filing paperwork with the county/city/township releasing the property from the mortgage obligation.  Because all my mortgage payoffs have either been or refinancing or I have sold the property, the balance due was significant and the lender required a cashiers check. Contact them to ask. If it only a few thousand left they might take a regular check. Sending the checks via overnight delivery speeds up the process, and cuts down on the uncertainty of the delivery date. Ask for a return receipt so that you have proof of the date it was received. Overpay by a couple of days. They will refund the overage. If you let the mortgage run its course, you will still get a document back from them; they will still file the documents with the local government; and they will refund any overage. If you look at the coupon book, or the paperwork they gave you at settlement the last payment is usually a different amount due to rounding of the monthly payments.  Of course if you have been making extra payments or larger than required payments the numbers on the original coupon book are moot so contact the company for the last payment amount.
That's a great answer. Now here's how it really works.  You forgive student debts, the lenders take major losses. This creates a major credit crisis and the financial institutions need to be bailed out all over again. This means using taxpayer dollars and printing massive amounts of money. The value of student debt is over $1 trillion. That is about a third what the government pays in a typical year, so just imaging how that would effect the deficit when they have to foot the bill because there is no way in the hell the banks are paying it.
Reading Great Lakes' page How Payments Are Applied, I think you are probably correct about how the payments are applied: Interest first, minimum on each loan next, then any extra is applied to the highest interest loan.  If I were you, I would make one payment a month, and I would make that payment as large as I possibly could. Trying to make more than one payment in a month is too complicated (and you aren't sure exactly how those payments get credited), and saving up for a big payment every few months is pointless and will cost you interest.
Well to start with I would make sure that the interest total you are collecting each month is greater than the interest total you are paying each month on your credit card debt.  So if you have $200 a month in interest you pay the credit card company I would make sure that the interest you collect on the loan is more than $200 a month.  And make sure that you use some portion of the principle payment to pay down the credit card debt so that you are still even or ahead of the interest you owe the credit card company. Beyond that I would want the rate to be higher than the borrower could expect from a bank.  This will incentivize the borrower to either pay it off early or refinance the loan through a bank effectively paying it off early for you.  Anything that shifts the risk off of you and onto someone else is in your favor here. You could also implement some sort of final payment fee and reduce this fee by a certain amount (presumably up to 100%) if it is paid off early.  I would graduate that amount so there is still incentive if the buyer misses the original date but still incentive to meet the date.  If the loan was for 10 years then I would probably do around .5% per year early.   I would also get an attorney to draw up the loan paperwork to make sure that you(and potentially your heirs) are covered should you need to recover from a default, bankruptcy, or other potential problems.  I would bet the lawyer fees will save you 5x+ the amount if only in headaches.  And if you are dealing with family the lawyer makes a great fall guy to say I wish I could do that but the lawyer won't let me if the family member tries to take advantage.
"They're not all ""bad at math borrowers"". How would you like it if you applied for a mortgage, very carefully reviewed all the paperwork, and then the mortgage broker simply transposes your signature to another set of documents with different rates?  People got screwed because the companies often screwed them. For every person with zero income who got a home, who's no worse off now than before, there's dozens who got refinanced and later thrown out on the street when their rates magically reset."
You might try to refinance some of those loans. It sounds like you are serious about minimizing interest expense, if you think you will be able to pay those loans in full within  five years you might also try a loan that is fixed for five years before becoming variable.  If you do not think you can repay the loans in full before that time, you should probably stick with the fixed rates that you have. It may even be profitable to refinance those loans through another lender at the exact same fixed rate because it gets around their repayment tricks that effectively increase your interest on those two smaller loans.
Unfortunately, you still owe the collection agency the money. Once they bought your debt, they became the ones that you needed to pay. Nothing that you do or pay to the apartment complex has any bearing on their right to collect that debt. As far as the agency is concerned you gave the apartment complex a gift.  As to whether you can get the complex to refund that payment, you will need to speak to a lawyer. And it may hinge on what obligation the complex had of reminding/informing you that your debt had been sold to a collection agency.
"This doesn't say the whole story (like the length of the HELOC). if you have 15 years left on a mortgage and ""refinance"" into a 30 year HELOC then yes, your payments maybe 20% lower, but you add 15 years to pay it off.  Just remember that interest occurs daily on what you owe. If you move 100K of debt from 5% mortgage to 6% HELOC you'll be paying more to the banks no matter how you slice it."
It depends on how long it will take you to pay off the personal loan, the rate for the personal loan, the refi rate you think you can get, how much principal you will have to add to get the refi (may have gone up since then). Since you did not provide all the necessary details, the general answer is to sketch out your total payments (mortgage + personal loan) with and without the refi over the life of the mortgage and see if you end up with more money in your pocket with the refi. My overall impression based on the details you did provide is that you will probably find it worthwhile to do the refi.
"The loan is the loan, the down payment is not part of the loan.  The principle amount owed on the loan at the beginning of the loan is the amount of the loan. If your loan amount is $390,000 then that's below the ""jumbo"" classification.  Your down payment is irrelevant. Lenders may want or require 20% (or any other amount) down so the loan will meet certain ""loan to value"" ratio requirements. In the case of real estate the lenders in general want a 20% down side cushion before you're ""upside down"" (owe more than the home is worth). This is not unique to homes and is common in many secured lending instruments; like cars for example."
"The usual rule of thumb is that you should start considering refinance when you can lower the effective interest rate by 1% or more. If you're now paying 4.7% this would mean you should be looking for loans at 3.7% or better to find something that's really worth considering. One exception is if the bank is willing to do an ""in-place refinance"", with no closing costs and no points. Sometimes banks will offer this as a way of retaining customers who would otherwise be tempted to refinance elsewhere. You should still shop around before accepting this kind of offer, to make sure it really is your best option. Most banks offer calculators on their websites that will let you compare your current mortgage to a hypothetical new one. Feed the numbers in, and it can tell you what the difference in payment size will be, how long you need to keep the house before the savings have paid for the closing costs, and what the actual savings will be if you sell the house in any given year (or total savings if you don't sell until after the mortgage is paid off). Remember that In addition to closing costs there are amortization effects. In the early stages of a standard mortgage your money is mostly paying interest; the amount paying down the principal increases over the life of the loan. That's another of the reasons you need to run the calculator; refinancing resets that clock."
The question Why would refinancing my mortgage increase my PMI, even though rates are lower? contains a decent discussion of PMI. It's based on the total amount you borrow, not just the difference to 80% LTV.  For easy math, Say you put 15% down on a $100K house. Your PMI is 1.1%, not on the 'missing' $5000, but on the $85000 balance. So you are paying $935/yr extra due to the $5000 you didn't have available. In addition to the mortgage itself. Even at 90% LTV, you'd pay $990/yr for the fact that you are short $10,000.  Other than this discussion of PMI calculations, Chad's answer is pretty thorough.
"2.5%? Whoa, you are being robbed there.  Straight-up, stripped-down, and bent-over-a-table robbed. Never agree to ""fees"".  If they don't want to do the work to give you a loan, there are other lenders who do. Rarely agree to ""points"".  If you know -- and I don't mean ""think"", I mean ""know"" -- if you know that you are going to hold that loan much longer than it would take to repay those points, then maybe.  For example, if they are charging one point to lower your rate 0.25%, you want to be totally sure you will stay in the house at least four years, and probably more like six or eight years before moving or refinancing. It's more-or-less OK to pay for the appraisal.  If something goes wrong with the loan application, the appraisal will be valid for a few more months, you can try again. I once had 14% cash for a down-payment.  The loan officer said if I could come up with 15%, the rate would be reduced by 0.25%.  To get the money, I took a ""reverse point"", which paid me 1% but raised my the rate by 0.25%. The loan officer, who wasn't too bright, asked, ""Why did you do that?  The two things cancel each other out."" ""I did it,"" I explained, ""because you paid me 1% of the value of my house to sign my name twice."""
If you can get the main loan low enough, even if the other is like say 7%, your blended rate may still be right around 5% If you can find a deal like this, it's also great material to use to negotiate with your current lender ""either help me get the PMI off this loan or I'm going to refinance."" Then you can compare what they will offer you with what you can get in a refinance and decide what makes the most sense for you. On word of warning, when refinancing, do NOT get sucked into an adjustable rate mortgage. If you are finding life 'tight' right now with house payments and all, the an ARM could be highly seductive since they often offer a very low initial rate.. however then invariably adjust upwards, and you could suddenly find yourself with a monster payment far larger than what you have now. With low rates where they are, getting a conventional fixed rate loan (or loans in the case of the tactic being discussed here) is the way to go."
"Any sensible lender will require a lean lien against your formerly-free-and-clear property, and will likely require an appraisal of the property. The lender is free to reject the deal if the house is in any way not fitting their underwriting requirements; examples of such situations would be if the house is in a flood/emergency zone, in a declining area, an unusual property (and therefore hard to compare to other properties), not in salable condition (so even if they foreclose on it they'd have a questionable ability to get their money back), and so forth. Some lenders won't accept mobile homes (manufactured housing) as collateral, for instance, and also if the lender agrees they may also require insurance on the property to be maintained so they can ensure that a terrible fate doesn't befall both properties at one time (as happens occasionally). On the downside, in my experience (in the US) lenders will often require a lower loan percentage than a comparable cash down deal. An example I encountered was that the lender would happily provide 90% loan-to-value if a cash down payment was provided, but would not go above 75% LTV if real estate was provided instead. These sort of deals are especially common in cases of new construction, where people often own the land outright and want to use it as collateral for the building of a home on that same land, but it's not uncommon in any case (just less common than cash down deals). Depending on where you live and where you want to buy vs where the property you already own is located, I'd suggest just directly talking to where you want to first consider getting a quote for financing. This is not an especially exotic transaction, so the loan officer should be able to direct you if they accept such deals and what their conditions are for such arrangements. On the upside, many lenders still treat the LTV% to calculate their rate quote the same no matter where the ""down payment"" is coming from, with the lower the LTV the lower the interest rate they'll be willing to quote. Some lenders might not, and some might require extra closing fees - you may need to shop around.
When evaluating a refinance, you need to figure out the payback time. Refinancing costs money in closing costs. The payback time is the time it takes to recover the closing costs with the amount of money you are saving in interest.  For example, if the closing costs are $2,000, your payback time is 2 years if it takes 2 years to save that amount in interest with the new interest rate vs. the old one.  To estimate this, look at the difference in interest rate between your mortgage and the new one, and your mortgage balance. For example, let's say that you have $100,000 left on your mortgage, and the new rate is 1% lower than your current rate. In one year, you will save roughly $1,000 in interest. If your closing costs are $2,000, then your payback time is somewhere around 2 years. If you plan on staying in this house longer than the payback time, then it is beneficial to refinance.  There are mortgage refinance calculators online that will calculate payback time more precisely.  One thing to watch out for: when you refinance, if you expand the term of your mortgage, you might end up paying more interest over the long term, even though your rate is less and your monthly payment is less. For example, let's say you currently have 8 years left on a 15-year mortgage. If you refinance to a new 15-year mortgage, your monthly payment will go down, but if you only pay the new minimum payment for the next 15 years, you could end up paying more in interest than if you had just continued with your old mortgage for the next 8 years. To avoid this, refinance to a new mortgage with a term close to what you have left on your current mortgage. If you can't do that, continue paying whatever your current monthly payment is after you refinance, and you'll pay your new mortgage early and save on interest.
You can talk to a banker about this now, get preapproved(which helps with getting offers accepted sometimes), and find out more details about the mortgage they will offer you. This meeting should be free(I would say will but some bank would charge just to prove me wrong) and help answer your questions more authoritatively than anyone here can. 3 - The costs will come out of your down payment. So if you put down 42.5k down your costs will come out of that. So you will probably end up with 30~35k being applied towards your purchase price with the rest going for costs. You can tell the banker you want to put 10% towards the price and the banker will give you a down payment probably around 50k to cover costs etc. (My figures are hopefully intentionally high better to find out that it will cost less than my guesstimate than get your hopes up just to find out the costs are higher than expected.)
If that $6k includes points to buy down the rate, it could be a good deal, depending on the total cost of the house and the rates involved. If that's pure administrative and legal fees, that seems pretty high. I've bought a number of houses in my time and I don't think I ever paid over $2000. I refinanced my current house a year or two ago, with the same bank, and total closing costs were $500. That said, I don't know where you live, the cost of the house, etc. Might be that's normal in your area and your circumstances. But I'd shop around before just accepting it.
How is the current mortgage payment broken out? I have a mortgage on a rental property with a payment of $775, but $600 is principal. If I were at breakeven on a sale or a bit underwater, I'd be better off just holding still, the tenant paying the loan down over $7000/year.  You question is a good one, but a good answer would require more details. A bank may not agree to a short sale on an investment property, especially since there's a second property to go after. I'm not making a judgement, just saying, it's not a slam-dunk to just short sell it.
Yes.  I've spoken to mortgage officers from various banks who will do conventional loans with anything as low as 3.5% down, however there are many more restrictions (e.g., normally you can borrow funds from a parent or relative for a down payment, in this case that was prohibited). If you are already pre-approved, then your approval letter should state the specifics you need to adhere to.  If you would like to modify that (e.g. put a smaller amount down), then you could still get the loan, but your pre-approval won't be valid. I would recommend speaking with your lender (and perhaps with a few others as well) about the new home you are looking at.
There's several different trade-offs wrapped up in your question. In general, refinancing a mortgage to a lower interest rate makes sense if you are certain you'll be living in the house for N years.  N depends on your closing costs and points.  Basically you need to calculate the break-even point for when the savings from the reduced interest rate exceeds the cost of the re-fi.  When I refinanced, the broker did the calculations for me for a range of options, maybe yours could as well. The trade off in selecting 30-year vs. 15-year is between monthly payment and total outlay.  A 15-year mortgage will have a higher monthly payment, but the total money that is paid out the bank (rather than to your equity) will be less. Using the Heloc to do the down payment seems sketchy; plus then you have two loan payments you're making each month.  Why not keep it simple and look for a $250k loan with 5% down?  Presumably with the current mortgage you already put in a good down payment, and have built some equity up.