Waiting for the FED to refi?

If your mortgage is more than 3 years old, it really likely that your mortgage rate is higher than it needs to be. It may be time to refinance. Don’t wait for the FED to drop rates as we often hear from fence sitting clients. As you can clearly see from the chart the FED has little if any influence on mortgage rates.

Relative to any point in time since August 2005, mortgage rates are extremely low.
If your mortgage is being professionally managed for you, your loan officer has already called you to start the remortgage process.

If he hasn’t called, it may be time to find a new loan officer. But besides low rates, though, there’s another major reason to check in with your loan officer.

In a down market, product innovation stops and the process of contraction begins.

Mortgage lenders are constantly eliminating “fringe” mortgage products.

Now, “fringe” is a non-specific word because its definition changes constantly. What was “fringe” in 2005, for example, is somewhere in the nightmares and the enormous losses of the banks. This is why a home loan that gets approved today is not promised to be approved tomorrow.

And today’s low mortgage rates don’t mean a thing if you can’t get a mortgage that uses them.

Special mortgage products for low-income or first-time home buyer programs, including HomePossible and MyCommunity programs.
Mortgages on investment properties with less than 20% equity in the home. This is a very different-looking list from the one of Summer 2007 which included home equity lines of credit to 100% and 90% investment property mortgages. These loans have since been discontinued and cast away by investors.