When borrowing money for a mortgage, homebuyers are primarily concerned with simply qualifying. Still, paying attention to the length of the loan is a borrowing tip that can save you a ton of money.
Home Loans
In the mortgage industry, the length of your loan used to be the only major issue you had to deal with. How times have changed! In the current market, the variety of loans that exist are simply stunning. Of course, the massive increase in loan options has inevitably led to massive confusion.
Borrowing Tip
Regardless of the type of loan you go with, you should always try to keep your loan term as short as possible. The shorter the loan period, the less you will pay in interest. Here an example using 15 and 30 year loans.
Assume our first homebuyer gets a 100,000 loan at 8 percent interest. He length of the loan is 30 years with a monthly payment of 733.76. For this mortgage, our homebuyer is going to pay 164,155.25 in interest over the life of the loan.
Now, take the same scenario, but reduce the term of the loan to 15 years. Our homebuyer is going to see the monthly payment bumped to 955.65 per month. Over the length of the loan, our homebuyer is going to pay 90,000 less in interest payments over the life of the loan. On top of this, the house will be paid off in half the time.
When borrowing money for a home purchase, you have to carefully budget your finances. If you can afford increased monthly payments, however, a shorter loan length is going to save you a lot of money over time.
In the recent weeks many people is refinancing with new adjustable rates mortgages that keep monthly payments low.
Faced with a sharp increase in the monthly payments and a need to take cash out of their homes,
people is refinancing eralier this year to keep payments the same.
By the time the loan rate goes up, your income will have increased enough to cover the higher payments.
Typically set at artificially low rates in the first years of the loan, these mortgages are then reset at the prevailing interest rates.
For borrowers, the bet was that interest rates would remain low. Now the first big wave of the loan boom is cresting more than 300 billion worth of adjustable-rate mortgages, or about 5% of all outstanding mortgage debt.
For instance, a typical borrower with a 200,000 ARM could see his monthly payments increase neraly 25%, when the ARM adjusts from 4.5 percent to 6.5 percent. In total pounds, that is an increase from 1013 a month to 1254.
Instead of paying more now, many borrowers are refinancing into their second or third adjustable-rate mortgage.
So far, the number of borrowers refinancing this way is relatively small but mortgage industry official expect the numbers will surge next 2007. In doing so,these borrowers are pushing out any eventual shock of higher payments by another two or three years, if not longer.
For now this mini-debt consolidation boom is assuaging fears that rising interest rates and higher monthly payments would drive some borrowers into foreclosure or force them to scale back sharply on other spending.
This refinancing represents also a doubling down on a bet that housing prices will continue to rise; if the value of the home falls closer to the amount of the loan, that could affect the possibility of refinance, and may prompt the homeowner to either invest more the home or to sell it.
Adjustable loans come in many forms; most have low and fixed rates initially, many also let borrowers pay only interest portion of debt or even less than that. After the introductory period ends, lenders require bigger payments and can raise interest rates.
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11:15 am • 
