kahunaburger

I crunched a lot of numbers lately and it seemed to make most sense to get rid of my 2nd mortgage (Home Equity Loan) to reduce my monthly payments and make sure I’m paying down principal and interest consistently. My experience with E*Trade was a good one in the past and I decided to do the refinance using them.

Before I go any further: refinancing these days is no longer a walk in the park. I had to produce documentation that I never thought I would have to ever show for a simple refinance. Everything was turned upside down, double checked and triple checked. The most ridiculous piece of documentation was a confirmation letter from my employer that I’m allowed to work remotely – after doing so for the past 10 years. And just on the side: initially they were worried about my location of my primary residence and place of employment; at one point they even claimed that I was hiding travel expenses to go from New Mexico to California for work.

This has been the most gruesome and long-winded process ever, but I’m happy I went through with it.

Now I’m the proud owner of a single, fixed-rate mortgage and I’m not planning to change anything about it in the future. And this time I think I hit pretty close to the sweet spot (mortgage rates over the last five years are in the chart below):

During my lunch break today I went over to Wells Fargo on Zafarano and closed my accounts. My Home Equity Loan was bound to my Checking account there and had I made my regular payments from a non-WF account they would have charged me extra (how do they get away with this?). Now that the Home Equity Loan is gone, there’s absolutely no need to stay with them.