Cash Out Refinance - Things To Know About Refinancing Your Mortgage To Get Cash Out

By Carrie Reeder

A cash-out mortgage allows you to refinance your mortgage and pull out part of your equity. Before deciding how much cash to use, be aware of the impact of PMI and equity amounts. However, you may find the benefits of refinancing outweigh the costs.

Cash-Out Mortgage Basics:

With a cash-out mortgage, you can refinance for lower rates or to just get part of your equity out. Once the refinancing process is completed, you will end up with a check. You can decide to take up to 90% of your home’s equity in some cases. However, cashing-out a large percent of your home’s value will impact your refinancing rate and might require you to carry private mortgage insurance (PMI).

The Cost Of PMI:

Just like with a regular mortgage, you will be required to carry PMI if you take out more than 80% of the home’s value. PMI protects the mortgage lender since there is a higher risk of default with such loans. You will pay premiums when the loan closes and with each month’s mortgage payment. PMI can easily add up to hundreds a year. You can also drop PMI once you build up your principal to 20% or the home appreciates so that your equity is over 20%. With home appreciation, you will have to pay for an appraiser’s inspection. You will also have to make an official request to the mortgage lender to drop PMI.

 Higher Rates:

You may also find yourself paying higher interest rates, at least a quarter percent, for cashing out over 75% of your home’s value. Lenders charge higher rates because there is an increased risk level. Your credit history will also be a factor in the type of financial package you qualify for.

Benefits Of Cashing-Out:

While there are costs associated with a cash-out mortgage, you should also remember the benefits. You can write off the interest on your taxes and you qualify for lower rates than with other types of credit. You can also spread out your payments over a longer period, lessening the monthly financial burden.

Taking out more than 75% of your home’s equity is not necessarily a bad decision. You just need to weigh the financial costs. You may find that in the long-run, tapping into your home equity is better than the other types of credit available to you. You may also discover that the tax benefits offset the slightly higher costs.

You might think that deciding to refinance a mortgage requires only a quick comparison of loan interest rates. Unfortunately, that’s not really true. Refinancing is trickier than that! Fortunately, three useful rules of thumb can often help you make sense of refinancing opportunities.

Rule 1: Don’t Ignore Total Interest Costs

You really want to use refinancing as a way to reduce the total interest cost you pay. While that sounds simple in principle, it is sometimes difficult to do. The interest costs you pay are a function of the interest rate, the loan balance, and the loan term period. When people refinance, they tend to focus solely on the loan interest rate. But they often don’t pay as much attention to the loan term or the loan balance. When you use refinancing—even refinancing at a lower interest rate—to increase your borrowing or to extend the time over which you borrow, you often aren’t saving money.

Rule 2: Trade Expensive Money for Cheap Money

For refinancing to make economic sense, however, you do need to swap higher interest rate debt for lower interest rate debt. This calculation, however, is tricky. To make an apples-to-apples comparison, you must look at the annual percentage rate that will be charged on your new loan—this is the best measure of the new loan’s interest rate cost—and then compare this to the loan interest rate on your old loan. You don’t want to compare interest rates on the two loans nor do you want to compare annual percentage rates on the two loans. Again, just to make this perfectly clear: You want to compare the loan interest rate on the old loan to the annual percentage rate on the new loan.

When the annual percentage rate on the new loan is lower than the loan interest rate on the old loan, then you are truly paying a lower interest rate. Comparing annual percentage rates with loan interest rates seems confusing at first. But note that you would pay only interest on your old or current loan, so that’s all you need to look at in terms of its costs. With a new loan, however, you would pay both interest and any origination or closing cost fees. The annual percentage rate wraps the interest rate charges and setup charges, origination charges, and closing cost fees into one interest rate-like number.

Rule 3: Don’t Lengthen the Repayment Period

Be careful that you don’t extend the length of time you borrow by continually refinancing. For example, one common rule of thumb states that every time interest rates drop by two percentage points, you should refinance your mortgage. However, there have been times in recent history when following this rule would have had you refinancing your mortgage every few years. This could mean that you would never get your mortgage paid off. If you refinanced every few years, you would suddenly find yourself still 30 years away from having your mortgage paid.