If I Had a Crystal Ball – The Freezing My Butt off Edition

Well, it never seems to fail.  I’ve never been able to time the market and trying to time interest rates has proven to be just as difficult.  I locked in our refinance rate at 4.875% for a 30 year fixed rate loan.  It’s a great rate and I’m thrilled to have gotten it.  Of course rates have come back down further since then.  My credit union is now offering a rate of 4.5% for a 30 year fixed.  That costs a bit but there is a 0 points option at 4.625.  Oh well.

I was thinking that if rates stayed low, or went lower maybe I could extend my closing out passed my 45 day lock period so that I could lock in a new lower rate.  Apparently I’m not the first person to think like that as my credit union clearly states on their terms that if I go passed the lock period, they will lock in a new rate that is the higher of my current locked rate, or the new market rate if that is higher.  Bastards.  So, whether rates go up or down, they get the best deal.

Oh well.  I’m still happy with the rate I locked in and the business case for doing the refinance hasn’t changed.  We will still benefit from it.

It’s good that we will be saving money on our mortgage because it’s getting cold here.  I may need to use some of that savings to run the furnace much more often.  They are predicting that the temperature could get down to 10 degrees by early next week.  That’s darned cold for the Pacific Northwest.  It hasn’t been that cold here since 1990.  I’m actually looking forward to a change in the weather.  It’s always fun to mix it up a bit and have a little bit different weather.  I’d love to see a foot of snow here, although that is extremely rare.

In other unrelated news, I noticed that the blogs are alive with the story of Bernard Madoff.  Apparently Bernard has been very busy spending other people’s money in what’s turning out to be the largest Ponzi scheme of all time.  $50 Billion dollars worth.  What’s fascinating to me about this is that there were a lot of hedge funds and wealthy individuals that were stripped of a lot of money.  Gosh, I thought Ponzi schemes were a poor man’s risk.  It’s hard to believe that this could go on for so long.  Whatever happened to third party audits?  I wouldn’t have invested a large amount of money unless someone could show me that the books were independently audited.  Then again, I’m a fairly paranoid individual.  I think I’ll just continue to trust myself with my money.