Monday, October 19, 2009

Saving Your Home Or Money By Refinancing

By James Weekson

If you are dealing with stressful times and have a mortgage in existence you need to try hard not to have your lender foreclose on your property as it is bad. Not to do anything only makes your debt worse since the interest will be compounded. There is a better option to try and that is refinancing.

A simple way of understanding what refinance means is it is taking out a second mortgage to then pay off the existing mortgage. Recently it is not always the situation as it is being used as troubled debt restructuring which is allowing creditors to collect on a bad debt and giving the debtors some relief from their debt.

When these circumstances occur to do a refinance there is a little "tweaking" of the interest, principal, rate and repayment period. When you go to refinance your mortgage the loans present value is calculated so that the new principal total would usually include a portion of the remaining unpaid from the original loan plus interest and surcharges, if there are any applicable.

Once the new principal is fixed then you need to negotiate a new interest rate and most often the rates allowed will depend upon the current market averages. The market rates always fluctuate, but refinancing is usually a good move when the rates are low. If refinancing is done in order to restructure debt that is causing trouble, then the interest rate is negotiable regardless of what the conditions on the market are.

However, after refinancing a mortgage there will always be a lower interest rate than the original mortgage had. This means the person with the mortgage will have more affordable payments each month, but the lender will also win since the difference is made up by allowing the debtor a longer repayment time period.

Something you need not think twice about is that your lender is going to profit on the interest over the life of the refinanced mortgage since in the end if your previous mortgage was in trouble and with the refinancing you managed to maintain ownership of your home being the monthly payments were lower, it was well worth it.

Recently, though, refinancing mortgages now has a different meaning for those who own a home. Even though refinancing is mostly a way of restructuring a troubled mortgage, there are those who use it as a way to save on interest payments. The same factors still play a role in this case and they are the interest rates, repayment period and principal loan amount.

To save on interest costs, homeowners renegotiate an existing mortgage to take advantage of low interest rates or to shorten the repayment terms, if they can comfortably afford to make higher monthly payments. Holding all things equal, this situation still favors the bank or mortgage company as it speeds up repayment and reduces the risk of defaults and foreclosures. Banks, especially, prefer cash to inventories because it costs more to keep and maintain properties than to use cash.

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