Why Refinancing your Home can be Beneficial to your Financial Health

When executed correctly, refinancing a home mortgage can save families significant amounts of money over many years by cutting sharply their interest expense. Of course, understanding if refinancing is the right path to take depends upon a borrower's specific situation. 

Generally speaking, refinance mortgage rates make sense when a family can reduce its interest costs enough to more than offset a new loan's settlement costs.

Closing Costs and Expenses

Refinancing a mortgage with an above market interest rate can yield instant benefits for your family's financial well-being. Refinancing too frequently or without consideration of associated settlement costs can have the opposite effect. 

Ideally, refinancing should be undertaken when it is abundantly clear that sufficient interest savings can be realized over the life of the loan. Other good reasons for refinancing include debt consolidation and the funding of important financial obligations such as a child's education or tax payments. 

These important things cannot be done by the average homeowner with most bank loans or credit products because the interest rates, terms and tax-treatment can never be so favorable.

Managing you Credit

If you are having problems with debt and bad credit, then this is another reason why you might want to refinance. However, this is kind of contingent upon whether or not you have been able to keep up on your mortgage payments. If you have, this helps improve your credit score. This might help you refinance into a loan with a much lower interest rates and decreased payments. 

Government Agency Mortgage Programs

Today, the U.S. government through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) provides the mortgage money market with significant amounts of liquidity with the goal of promoting home ownership. The government does this through two agencies, the FHA, and the VA (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs). 

The mandate of the VA is to guarantee repayment of mortgage loans granted to U.S. service men and women. These loans are issued by qualified lenders such as Low VA Rates, one of the many lenders that active and retired members of the service rely on for VA home loan financing.

The Adjustable Rate Mortgage (ARM)

An adjustable rate mortgage may be exactly what your family needs if you plan to sell your house within in the next few years. ARM loans will commonly provide the borrower with a significantly lower start rate than what they currently have. 

If a new ARM loan's accumulated savings surpass the total closing costs by the time your house needs to sell, then refinancing with an ARM can be beneficial to your family's present financial position.

Fixed-Rate Mortgage

For some people refinancing into a fixed-rate mortgage is the better way to go. The reason for this, is that if you are already struggling financially, a fixed-rate mortgage takes away of any risk of your mortgage going up and making you more financially unstable. It will stay at the same rate the entire life of the mortgage.

Before refinancing your home, you must make sure that it is right for you. You only want to do it if it is actually going to save you money in the end. Refinancing without proper consideration of the long-term costs and effects can be an expensive mistake. 

So can cashing out home equity for the sake of financing consumer spending that does nothing to enhance one's personal balance sheet. On the other hand, saving tens of thousands of dollars over the life of a twenty or thirty-year loan by replacing it with a new loan makes all the sense in the world if it can be justified after examining the economics of the situation.