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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  1769 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Refinancing Boom Fuels Mortgages to Postcrisis Record

I'ma just start tagging my economics shit with #everythingbubble. Lemme cherrypick some shit:

    Their rate dropped from 6.25% to 4.99%, cutting their monthly payment. The couple managed to pay down their medical bills and chose to keep paying their prerefinancing payment of $1,250 for their three-bedroom, three-bathroom house.

Okay one, that's great and if I were the Devlins I would do the exact same thing. But two, the Devlins' medical debt is now housing debt so we're not tracking things the same way.

    In Philadelphia, Annie Heckenberger’s older brother told her it would be smart to refinance the house she bought about a year earlier. His advice helped her lock in a new rate of 3.88%, more than a percentage point lower than her original one.

Okay one, that's great and I'm glad Annie is saving money. But two, Annie effectively made nothing but interest payments on her house for a year.

    Low rates aren’t always entirely good for those first-time buyers. Low rates can also inflate home prices, since borrowers can afford bigger mortgages and might bid more for homes than they otherwise would.

Right so one of our midwives is refinancing a house she bought in July. The interest-only-payment-thing is in full effect here but perhaps more importantly, what started as a VA loan is now a refi and the ragged-edge-of-what-they-could-afford payment for the house they decided to gut is now a ragged-edge-of-what-they-can-afford payment for a house plus enough money to cover the ungutting.

MEANWHILE

And look - we aren't going to be playing ARM games this time because the Fed is basically paying the bank to give you a mortgage. Frankly an ARM would be dope right now 'cuz rates be going down and could go negative. But when

    The Mortgage Bankers Association estimates that refinancings made up 38% of mortgage originations last year.

and

    Lenders extended $2.4 trillion in home loans last year, the most since 2006, according to industry research group Inside Mortgage Finance. That was also a 46% increase from 2018.

That means that there's 900 billion worth of refis out there.