Refi Complete!

Well, there were a number of hurdles, but my refinance is finally complete.

I have to say, I’m not a huge fan of the brokerage I used.  As of 5 pm the night before my closing, I still didn’t have my HUD1, so I didn’t know how much money I had to bring to the closing.  My closing was scheduled for 9am, which meant that I didn’t have time to get a certified check.  And the brokerage never answered my question as to whether or not a personal check was fine.  I had to bring less than $4000 to the table (a large chunk of that being the already paid tax bill that would be refunded based on my tax estimators), so I crossed my fingers and hoped it all worked out.

And it did.

Amusingly, half an hour after closing, I got a call from my broker asking if I had any questions before closing.  I laughed and reminded her that the closing had already occurred.  Thankfully it all went off without a hitch.

I received my refund for the tax bill last week, and I received confirmation from my old mortgage company that the mortgage was paid in full.

Next month, I make my first payment to the new company.  It was a lot of work, but I’m saving a few hundred dollars a month and something like $90,000 over the life of the loan, and that’s if I don’t make any extra payments.

Ideally, I would be paying the same amount every month and paying down the mortgage much more quickly, but right now, I’m just going to see how my finances play out.  I’d like to be able to use that money to continue the work I’m doing on the house.  At some point, my fence is actually going to fall down and will need to be replaced, for example.

Megan Smith

Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:

In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance.  It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information.  It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck.  While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.

While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.

Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.

So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan.  I needed to budget.  I needed to know what I was spending my money on.  I needed to prepare for the future.

I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way.  I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.