Well, it’s been a crazy and hectic summer around our house. We decided to make it even more hectic by refinancing our house as well. I mentioned it previously but now it’s finally complete. I’m still shaking my head at how much documentation they required from us. We have a credit score in the 800’s, have been at the same jobs for many years and have zero debt besides our mortgage on our main home but you would have thought we had scores in the 500’s with how crazy the documentation is these days.
Anyway, we’ve been patiently waiting for the loan to go through underwriting and it finally did a couple weeks ago. It was very convenient to have a notary come to our home to sign all the papers. I really can’t say enough good things about the Costco refinancing service. The fees were amazingly low (Costco negotiates those ahead of time so they are fixed). By doing the refi, we were able to drop our payment by over $400 a month and get a rate of 3.625 for a 30 year fixed rate mortgage. We’ll continue paying the higher payment but it’s nice to know we can scale it back if we need to.
With the refinancing complete, I updated my personal finance spreadsheet and took a look at the numbers. With the lower house payment, our budget is now 43% of our after tax, after investment income (ATAI). That means that, after we pay our payroll taxes and subtract all of our 401k contributions, we are keeping our budget at 43% of our take home pay. At one point our budget exceeded 50% of our ATAI income which always bothered me. We have done our best to live at a much lower level than our income would support. I do this for a number of reasons but mostly because I’ve always tried to keep our standard of living at a level we could support if either of us lost our jobs, or we both did and had to work lower paid service jobs. It’s probably kind of silly but it really does add to our peace of mind.
On a completely separate note, I returned from a week’s vacation to find a check for $500 in the mail. Apparently my sister had mentioned to her home builder that she’d heard about them from me. Many months later, once the house was complete, the builder called for my address and sent me a $500 check. I was shocked that they did this because, a) I had no idea that my sister mentioned it to them and b) had no idea they paid any sort of referral. It definitely improved my view of their company! Between this and the refund we’ll be getting from our previous mortgage’s escrow account, it looks like we’ll have some pretty good “surprise” income around our house for a few weeks. It’s likely that most of it will go towards some home improvements that we’ve been putting off.