A Hum-Dinger of a Refinance

Last week was a hum-dinger... just a lot going on. Wouldn't have had many post up except for the fact that I had already created many of the them beforehand and just had them scheduled on different days.

One of the hum-dingeroos was the refinance of our house/property. In December, I read a Yahoo News article and it talked about banks being overwhelmed (in the few days preceding the article) with home-refinances because of the low rates.

Well, that very day, I got on the ball with researching what we could get and running the numbers in a few 'refinance calculators' -everything looked great.

Side note: by the way, http://dinkytown.com/ has some of the BEST finance calculators. They have ALL sorts(!)- very cool for any person's planning/fiscal stage; retirement, college funds, etc. Can't say enough about this site and what a fiscal resource it is.

ANYway, on our refinance, we would break even in a matter of 3.25 years. Our note would be $386 less a month.. money that can go into a college fund for our daughter, retirement savings, and towards paying the mortgage principle down. Thus, making it around a 15 year loan (depending on how much we opt to pay) ...it was a no-brainier... so I locked in the next AM. Funny, the rates had already started to climb that morning. Mind you, they were/are still low (but we got a fixed 4.25%!).

THEN we got a this STACK to read.. now, I don't know about you... but I'm not one of those that signs without reading the fine print and every other number and nuance... and I have to understand it too. This trait has it good and bad points. But, when we got this stack... I felt like I was back in Graduate school.... a big, hearty 'Ugghhh'.

Well, I'm glad I did read every page because not only do I understand so much more about bank procedures and whatnot, I also caught a mistake that was made. About 80% of the time, they had our address incorrect. It was fine on the first few sheets, but then wrong on just about every other document. So, the documents were all redone. This stack here is the erroneous stack we received, but both were commensurate in length, needless to say.
All I Can say is,"Whew!" ...glad THAT is done.