Yesterday I went down to my local bank to see about refinancing my mortgage. I purchased an affordable condo in Saint Paul MN (we owe $108 k on it after 5 years of a 30 year mortgage). My daughter has been living there until this year, when we leased it to a friend of hers. Minneapolis housing market has fallen dramatically in the last five years, so we are significantly underwater on the mortgage, although we are in no way behind on payments. December 1 was the first day the changes in mortgage refinancing removing the 125% valuation clicked in and we were there to take advantage.
We know our local Chase bank well-we show up in person on Saturday morning and make payments and we just refinanced our primary mortgage. Karen, our Mortgage banker, called us in October to consider the precursor to this program, with the 125% cap. She was delighted we were there for the first day of the new program, since interest rates went down yesterday too.
Karen told us she couldn't wait to let others who qualified know. She mentioned I can waive $500 in fees because of my union membership (although other fees could be waived if you were a veteran). The paperwork was expedited and simplified and we walked out needing to produce no documents unlike our refinancing this summer. She mentioned that Chase had hired 60 second shift bankers to expedite underwriting and we could be contacted in an evening or on a weekend.
We have a good credit rating and good income and as of last month, current with our consumer credit but we are ramping up for retirement and need to save more. For the first time ever we are looking forward to maybe a year where we aren't living paycheck to paycheck and can build a savings account. The $177 in mortgage relief we will experience will go a long way to helping us this year.
So thanks Barack, and thanks for the health insurance extension for our 23 year old son in grad school. As one of the 99% and a government worker whose salary has been frozen for 3 years, I am pretty psyched to see a little less austerity around here. I donated $50 to the reelection campaign and signed up for $10 a month through November 2012. Hopefully this program can help some others here, even if it is really late, since banks are slowly starting to get it about refinancing the underwater.