I refinanced in July. My house is worth 3x what I paid for it 14 years ago. The price of it skyrocketed 2 years ago when house sales here were crazy stupid. The average house took one day to sell. My nephew and his wife bought their house 8 minutes after it went on the market. Well, it went on the market, 8 minutes after it was listed they made a phone call to see it, placed a bid on it and bought it the next day. The market is slowing down and prices are going down, but not so much that my house will be worth less than I paid for it.

You should be able to make lump sum payments once a month with your bank. I know I can, and it can reduce your interest in the long haul a lot, shortening the span it takes to pay off your house. Or you could do yearly lump sum payments. AND you can change how often you make your payments. I went from once a month to bi-weekly before I refinanced. You can do that anytime, just contact the bank. My bank has an application online. Once I refinanced, I told them to make my payments weekly. It knocks even more years off your mortgage.

When you get a mortgage you are going to be oweing more money than the house is worth for a loooooong time.

I do not understand what that has to do with refinancing?

The mortgage contract will tell you when you can make extra payments and how much extra you can pay. The terms will vary from contract to contract.

Property taxes are based in part on the value of the home, but I'll bet THEY'RE not going to go down.

DD#1 just refinanced her house. She knew she would have to do it 2 years after buying it, but had no clue the economy was going to be in this kind of shape.
She was so paniced after talking to the first place! She thought she'd have to come up with $10K down or sell the house and her and the boys would have to go back to an apartment! Oh she was so upset!! Then she called another place and NO worries, she got it done with no problems and now payments are lower and prop taxes and everything is all in the payments. She is actually saving I dunno $150 per month now.

TRy someone else and I bet you will get another view.

Another idea if the rates go down, is to keep your payments the same if you can. Then you will pay your house down much more quickly. I think that's what Kath was getting at.

dilly maybe I can explain;

Today, you have to have at least 20% equity in your home before some lenders will refinance (and a FICO score over 720).

When home values dropped, many owners lost most of their equity. Especially those with younger mortgages that were paying little on the Principle (and started out with a small down payment).

ML

She told me I could talk to some local realtors and get some comps myself but that was what she was showing. I called the other company I was talking to and left a message for them to call me back. Maybe I'll go get those comps myself, just to see.

kathsgrdn...do you know you can often get property values from your county's Appraiser's website (if they have a website)?

Or try zillow.com - its not always accurate or up to date, but a good site to try.

Fortunately we sold one house and bought another (teardown) before the bubble. The new house we completed in 2001 is still worth more than we invested, but not what it was worth on paper in 2006.

The same year (2000) we sold a rental property and elected to delay capital gains by buying a vacation rental condo on Maui. That, too, is still worth more than we've invested in it -- and it has carried itself to date -- but has suffered a loss on paper. The amazing thing there is that the tax assessment went DOWN for 2008-09. More amazing, the taxes themselves went down the same amount.

Kath, stay away from Countrywide. They had a high rate of bad mortgages.

When I sold my house last year, it had lost about 20K in value from the year before. Prices go up and down in cycles, and I ended up selling in a low cycle, but at least I didn't have a mortgage to pay off.

Property values in SW PA have gone up... no tank in the market here.

Linda, I already have my mortgage with them. LOL! I'm paying 6.1% on a fixed 30 year. Not too bad.

I'm in California-We've lost approx $250K in equity since '06. We are upside down at around $75K now and our value is $30K less than our original purchase price in '02. We aren't going anywhere soon.

Houses in our area have all gone down in price. It's a buyers market for sure.

linda_in_iowa.....we had our original loan with another company that CountryWide later bought out & took over the loan. Belive me, I would get out too, but there is a pre-payment penalty until March 2010. Right now, Countrywide is helping the people that need help & prioritizing them by urgency. DH & I tried to renegotiate a lower rate with a hardship letter "before we get in more deeply, but no help has come thru as yet" We are almost better to stop making payments in order to get "moved up on the priority list".

And, kathgrdn, home values (in my area) have definitely gone down, causing a lot of people to be upside down with their loans. (myself included) A house on my block had 5 contracts on it that fell thru because people were not able to get financing. They were on the market for just a few days over 1 year AND they had dropped $60,000. from the original list price to finally get sold.

Hard times for so many folks....a real shame.

I feel bad for everyone who's been affected by the economy. This is the first time it has really affected me other than our hospital cutting back on overtime...or so they say. When they're short, like this week, they go ahead and approve it anyway. I've worked 16 hours over this week.

i'm obsessed w/ neighborhood comps lol. it used to be because we gained more than 300% in value by 2007, then we started loosing, we bottomed out last summer at 200%. we've had mild gains since then i think mostly because:
1. there are no foreclosures in my subdivision
2. we're in the middle value of homes
3. homes sell still w/in 6 months (thou it used to be less than a day lol) because there are not alot coming up for sale and we have great schools & everything is w/in a couple miles (less driving)

i bought 8 yrs ago at the very start of the FL boom. i had to come up w/ 20% cash down and got a fixed 7% for 30 yrs, financed only $80K. i will be refinancing my current principle of $50K down to 4%, i have 75% equity and will extend back out to 30 yrs, pay no closing costs and have no escrow. i do not have a pre-payment penalty, i knew i would be paying down early.

my original payment was $550 including escrow lol. insurance has gone up 400% (i tried to file a hurricane claim in 2004 but was denied) plus taxes 200% during the last few yrs. my current payment on the same fixed rate is $900. wamu respa'd me so i had to cut a check for $1000 last jan.08 for escrow. after insurance and taxes were paid, i had $3000 leftover in escrow for 2008 :-0 shockingly they just cut me a check for $2000 refund, of course that was after jan 1 2009 so i pay taxes on the whole $3000. my payment will go down to $700 in march but if i refinance w/ someone else (i'll never deal w/ wamu again lol) at 4% for 30yrs w/ no closing costs & pulling out of escrow (BOA allows this since i have so much equity) my payment will be $400 if that. if i didn't refi i'd still end up $2000 over in escrow in nov 2009 why on earth they force you to pay sooo much extra is beyond me.

i need to get a car w/in the yr and also had all overtime cut during 2008 so my income was down 30% last yr :-0 so reducing my payment is important, not to mention i feel it's a waste of $$ paying sooo much extra. my dh just said a few hrs ago we should have sold during the peak, my reply was yes, we would have made a killing but also paid more than $100,000 higher for the same house we could get now for $350,000 not smart! ~ liz

I definitely lost on my house. It looks like about $80K to $100K right now. Not so sure what it will look like in a few months. If the loans can be made, it might help because I know a lot of people that want to sell NOW. They had started fixing up for selling within a year, just before the bubble hit here. I need to sell because I want to recover the money I spent on updates and remodels, with more coming. But I won't have enough equity to buy anything else. Hoped the house would pay for them, but not now. I was going to sell but decided not to when I got a new job very close to home.

I remember the '90s RE market plunge. I know this is different because so many areas are affected, but RE will come back soon. We may not be able to get the huge returns we had gotten used to, but I think something closer to normal - which is better than what we have now.

Oh, don't get me started.

We bought at $580k, with a mortgage of $460k. Our house is supposedly now worth about $380k (maybe less...it's been a couple of months since we checked). We've lost all our equity, and have no chance in heck of being able to refinance. Ah, the joys of having bought at the peak of the market in Southern California.

We try not to think about it too much.

About 6 months after we bought our house 2 years ago, we were upside down in it by 200k. We weren't happy, but what can you do?

We made out like bandits on the house we sold...and we soaked it all into this house.

Our house has lost enough for us to protest the property tax valuation, and we won. The value, as far as I was concerned, was vastly over-inflated by the whole real-estate bubble.

We're lucky, though. We paid cash when we built about 20 years ago, and we're not planning to move anytime soon.

Yes, Dilly-Dally, it is possible to find oneself with negative equity in a piece of real estate. When prices plummet like they have, it can be a real bear for those just barely hanging on.

Just spoke with our credit union today hoping to refinance. Keep your fingers crossed our house values has stayed the same for the past year and a half. I don't think WV has been hit as bad as most areas. Houses were cheap here to begin with (compared with the Atlanta markets). Should know in a few weeks how we will make out with this... Janie

Values here have gone down some, but not a lot. That's particularly true in this development. We have a community newsletter & a realtor lists properties in the development that have sold, what the sale price was & how long they were on the market. We were in the first neighborhood of the development, so we pretty much know what the build price was on each home & can tell how values are holding up from that.

We closed on our loan in June 06, construction was complete in Aug. 07. We refinanced in March 08 because rates had been steadily dropping. We managed to shave off a full point then. At that time the house appraised with a decent appreciation over the build price. I'm looking into refinancing again but it'll depend on how well values have held up. We're at 5.875% fixed now. While we'd like to get that lower, we won't complain too much if we can't.

Homes have gone down in Portland, OR. Fortunately we got a great deal on our house 6 years ago, so we are still ahead. But it's hard watching it go down each month. I feel sorry for people who bought within the last 2 years.

Value of homes way down here. We are where all the rv factories have closed and have houses sitting empty every where.
I don't think countrywide will even try working with you until your behind in your payments then that's when they want that hardship letter.

Patches, why would I be behind on my payments? I'm not having problems paying my mortgage, just wanting a better rate at a shorter term.

Kathsgrdn, when I called my credit union yesterday and asked about a "modication" they immediately asked if we were having problems meeting the payments. I explained that no (knock on wood) we were not but wanted to take advantage of the lower interest rates. I think it is an almost automatic assumption when you call that you are needing payment help.

Are there any credit unions you might be able to join (county, nursing assoc, etc). You might have better luck with them and I like dealing with the credit unions better than the mortgage companies.

Good luck!
Janie

Property values have gone down while my property taxes are
going up.