Buying A Home
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Re-fi question

So this is more of a refinancing a current home question.   Like many, we currently owe more than what our house is worth.  Does anyone know about the HARP program that is supposed to be available for people in our situation?

Re: Re-fi question

  • http://www.makinghomeaffordable.gov/programs/lower-rates/Pages/harp.aspx

    This is the website for it that I just looked up.

    It discusses eligibilty and steps to take, etc.

  • Thanks, that website helped a lot!  Unfortunately I can tell by the eligibility requirements it's not going to work for us.   I'll keep researching other options then.
  • Are you having trouble repaying your monthly payment now? Or is your rate variable and you want to get a fixed one?

    I know it is uncomfortable to be upside down on the house. If you can afford it monthly and have a good fixed rate, the best thing to do is just wait out the housing market by staying in the home for the longer term.

  • We are able to make the monthly payments, but live paycheck to paycheck.  So I've been trying to lower payments on everything.  We have a 5.375% (30-Year fix).  So it's not terrible, but we could lower it by 1.5% with the current interest rates, which would be huge on our payment.  But with being upside down, there isn't much we can do but wait it out.   I really wish we could just sell the house even coming out an even wash would be fine.  This house was never meant to be a forever home. 
  • I got a call a while back from our loan holder, Wells Fargo.  They told us we could do the HARP 2.0 and refinance up to 125% of our home's value.  I don't know how underwater you are but they did make this offer.  We declined because we were selling anyway but you may want to consider them or call your own mortgage company and see if they have something to offer since you are actualy paying your mortgage and many others are not.
  • We actually have WellsFargo as our mortgage holder now.  I talked with a different mortgage company (First Option Mortgage) last Friday and they saw on our house title that over two years ago we did refi under the HARP loan (I didn't remember that when signing papers), so that takes us out of the running to do it again.  And I now I know we didn't get the best interest rate from them.  We should have shopped around.  It seems like my husband and I make what we think are great decisions and then few years later turns out to not have been a good decision. 
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