Mortgage Refinancing & Debt Consolidation by Darrin Chandler [5 April 2005 13:00 MST]
A few months ago my wife and I received a postcard advertising mortgage refinancing. That's a pretty common event for homeowners, but this one we called on. Along with hordes of other people, we did the re-fi and lowered our interest rate. We played with a lot of numbers and figured things several different ways. We talked over our options. And then we did something pretty smart, I think…
We rolled our existing credit card debt into the new mortgage, which is 15 year 5.0% fixed. We have enough equity due to appreciation to do that and still have some equity in the house. Now we're going to pay what we used to pay for both the mortgage plus the credit cards, which should pay off the house in about 8 years! Now, we're not shelling out any more money than we were a couple of months ago. The interesting thing to me is why don't more people to this kind of thing. Why wouldn't you?
I believe most people are constantly looking for ways to squeeze more lifestyle out of their money right now, rather than looking even a few years into the future. Barring disasters, in less then ten years we'll own our house outright, have no credit card debt, and have a dual income. I'm impressed in spite of myself. If you'd told me a few years ago that I'd be in this kind of financial shape, I'd have laughed in disbelief. The great part is that it wasn't that hard. We didn't make that many sacrifices. We were just a bit more goal oriented than we'd been in the past. In a word: attitude.
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