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house vent...
so our mortgage payment is going up b/c our property taxes went up just over $1K this year! the town re-assessed all houses and of course our assessed value went up.
On the plus side, our house is still allegedly "worth" more than we owe (a year ago it was a difference of like $10K now it's like $29K with the new assessment).
We are now considering a refi - if we can get .5% knocked off our rate, we would save like $200 a month, which is basically the amount our mortgage payment went up, both b/c we have to pay a shortage in our escrow and start paying the higher rate at the same time. Of course we have to see what closing costs are, etc. to see if it would be worth it to refi. We still don't have quite enough equity for a conventional mortgage I don't think so we'd have to do FHA again.
So annoying, but at least the value of our house didn't go DOWN; I know a lot of people are dealing with that right now.
Re: house vent...
I know it's frusterating, we deal with it on a yearly basis. Our taxes went up about 17% total this year, 5% on school, and 12% on town/city. It sucks.
Check what type of FHA you have and the rate you are at now vs the new rate you'd close at. With our FHA (it's a streamlined FHA) we are able to refinance for free if the rate would drop by 1% or more OR our monthly (not including excrow) payment would drop by $50 or more. This, for us, is good for the life of the loan.
We've gotten right to the egde of being able to take advantage of this deal, but not quite yet as we started with a pretty low rate for our area.
PS - have you looked into getting the PMI off the loan yet (assuming you are still paying it)? If you have enough equity, you might be able to do that and save $ that way too.
I agree. Can't hurt to look. We're on a 5.25% FHA right now and are considering looking around. We both have great credit now and if we could get it under 4%, we might consider it. We have about 10% equity, which i senough for conventional around here.
Also, if you think your assessment is unfair, you can always go to city hall and contest it. If you have a good enough case for why it should be $X instead of $Y, you'll probably win. I'm of the mind that unless we are selling or wanting to take out a line of credit against our mortgage, I want a lower assessment. This is why I was ok when our letter came this year with our value going down a bit.
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For real? That's awesome. I'm going to look in to this. We wouldn't want to extend our term back to 30 years, but to drop off the PMI or even just drop the P&I $50 would be a win.
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Anyway, we opted to not let them in so they did it based only on the outside and what they had seen in 2007 or 08 at the last assessment. I don't even know how much inside stuff matters in this case (like refinished hardwoods vs carpet, adding a closet, updating light fixtures, new carpet and paint in sunroom) or if it is really just like square footage times location. So my concern now if we try to fight the assessment is that it would go UP not down if we asked them to re-evaluate. But I don't know if they can do that.
Oh man, what bad timing! Hopefully you can get back on that promo!
It could be worse! My cousin called me up at the end of last year to see if our taxes had gone way up because hers was 4K higher than the bill from the last year (we live only a few minutes from each other in the same city). Ours had actually gone down. She did some digging and it turned out that whoever did their closing messed up their escrow and they had been shorting their monthly payment to it for about 2 years. It's adjusted now, but they still owed the extra 4K on top of the correct payment amount.
That's weird. Have a lot of houses sold around you? Maybe that is what they are going off of. I'm constantly watching the activity in our neighborhood, just to know. Or, if your neighbors did some outside improvements, they may have also raised the value for you even if you didn't do anything.
I don't know exactly how it works, so I don't know if they'd raise it. If you think it was a fair assessment, though, I'd probably just leave it. I think it's worth thinking about, though.
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They screwed up on our escrow too and the numbers were way off. I told them they were wrong but they said they weren't. Hello, I work with numbers for a living...I scrutinize everything...but they didn't do anything about. A year later we get a notice stating we've been under paying so we owed a few thousand plus our payment went up $200. Boo. Our assessment has gone down since but still blows monkey guts.
Anyway, definitely work out the numbers before refinancing. I've been considering it as well. Saw the rates yesterday at 4.197% for a 30 year fixed. Ours is 5%...not sure if it would be worth it. If we could afford the 3.6% for a 15 year we'd go that route but money is tight and that extra $ that would go toward a 15 year would hurt.
Tell FiOS you are considering switching to satellite or just using Netflix. I bet they'll work something out.
CRAFTY ME
my read shelf:
We are at 4.375%, no points, 30yr. The PMI is like $50/mo. We could have bought down under 4, but the cost would have taken 4-7 yrs to recoup depending on how much we bought, and esp given the renos we need, that seems pretty BSC over $50-150/mo.
If you can afford a 15 yr, you can get some banging rates, but that is out of our price range + not rational given our student loan debt.
When we bought we only had to put 5% down on our conventional mortgage (we put more but not close to 10%) because our house was in a "stable market". We would have needed 10% if it was in a "declining market".
Our broker does no points/no closing costs loans. We didn't do the no closing costs part when we originally bought because we could get a better rate paying the cc's and the math worked out much better. When we refinanced last fall we did no points/no closing costs and the rate was pretty comparable to what you could get anywhere else. We dropped from 5% to 4.3something% without paying anything (except what we needed to put into Escrow for taxes and such and then got a check for the left over in our old Escrow account).