Refinancing

I am wondering if my DH and I are in the minority for refinancing our mortgage. We are currently looking to refi our mortgage we started with a 30 year mortgage and have been in the house 6 years so we have 24 years left. We have 2 options...the first is to go to a 15 year for about $350 more a month....the second is to go to a 20 year mortgage and keep our payments more or less the same.

We are leaning towards going with the 15 year mortgage to be done and over then but I am curious what everyone else would do.

Also when everyone says they save $x.xx amount of money on their refi are they saving the time too?

TIA for your responses on this, I am new to the process and just curious what other people have done.

Re: Refinancing

we were only 3 years into our 30 year mortgage. we don't plan on staying here for more than 5 more years. we went back to a thirty as advised by our accountant.

Do you plan on staying? if so...i would do the 15 year.

Re: Refinancing

We were in your situation. January will be six years and we are in the process of the re-fi now.

We had the option of going to a 20 and saving $200 a month or going back to a 30 and saving $800.

We chose option B for a few reasons:

1) We want to do some work on the house and we can use the extra cash monthly for those projects.

2) I really don't think that you will be able to borrow money this cheaply for a long time.

3) When we originally purchased, we were both working. We decided that since I am home with the kids that there was a better chance of being approved for the re-fi if the monthly payments were lower.

4) We are planning on making an extra $200 per month payment which will have us ending around the same time we would have with the current mortgage.

Re: Refinancing

We had a 30 year and I had paid off about 5-6 years of the mortgage I did not want to go back to a 30 year to "save" money. So we went with a 20 year because I think it ended up being $10 cheaper a month then what we were paying for a 30 year. I pay extra money every month toward my payment so it will probably be paid off in 15 years or less anyway. I think it is best to keep the payment the same and just pay whatever you can extra a month--this way you always have the lower payment to fall back on if needed.

Re: Refinancing

We just refi'd and went to a 20 year. We had just refi'd in 2009 so we only had 1.5 years paid, but going to a 20-year gave us a much better %, plus we will save $200k over the life of the loan. It was only about $200 more a month.