Tonight we reached a milestone as homeowners that I always assumed would come later into our ownership; but considering everything else we have already done on this house I guess I shouldn’t be surprised; we closed on our refinanced mortgage. I thought this was typically something people did after 5 or more years, but we are just shy of 2 years into our mortgage. Still, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. We ended up with a very similar rate, and a monthly payment that is about $20 more a month than we had previously. So why did we refinance then? A couple of reasons:

1. We have put a lot of work into the house namely the new roof, windows, and HVAC
2. The market has changed and we were pretty sure our house value had risen
3. And this is the big one, we shaved three years off the backend of the mortgage which will save us almost $30,000 over the life of the mortgage.

Previously we were in a fixed rate 30 year mortgage and had been in for almost 2 years, leaving us with 28 years to go, the new mortgage is a 25 year fixed rate thus eliminating 3 years and leading to the savings. The appraised value of our house did go up as well by almost $10,000 giving us more equity in the house which also means that our PMI will fall off sooner, adding additional savings. We also changed lenders, we moved from Wells Fargo to Quicken Loans and are extremely happy with the service, support, and communication they provided throughout the process. We are utterly satisfied with the outcome of this refinance in terms of the process itself and the end results. Additionally, we recommend Quicken Loans to anyone in an instant, they are outstanding to work with!