Day 101 - Monday 6th April 2009

The weather is still fantastic, sad to spend a large amount of it in the office.

And sadder still to spend an hour of the evening sun after work at the bank, talking to a mortgage advisor to work out whether it was worth re-financing our mortgage to take advantage of the lower interest rates.

As we already have a reasonable deal on our mortgage it wouldn’t really gain us much partly due to re-financing/closing fees and partly due to the $300 per month PMI (private mortgage insurance) which due to the new rules we would have to pay. We didn’t have to pay when we bought the house due to slightly different rules and putting down a large enough deposit. So overall I think we have made the correct decision not to refinance.

We have made the positive step of setting up an auto-pay to increase the amount we are paying against the principle of our Mortgage, which effectively drops 15 years off the life of the mortgage. We’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but never quite gotten around to it. If in the future we can’t sustain the amount we are putting against the principle we are not committed to it so can cancel/reduce it at a moments notice.

The thought of being mortgage free in 13 years instead of 28 years is very uplifting/exciting.