Lowered our HELOC Rate

From the If you don’t ask, you won’t get department:

When we bought the lake house property and structure we used some money from a home equity line of credit that we’d set up months before.  We didn’t borrow a ton of money but at the time we locked in the interest rate.  I’ve read too many horror stories about payments adjusting up as the bank raised the interest rate.  The rate was good at the time but since then the credit union has lowered their interest rate for new HELOC’s.  For the past couple months it has eaten at me a bit so I decided to make a call to my credit union to ask them to lower the rate.

When I made the call I greeted the customer service rep and told her that I was considering borrowing from another institution to pay this loan off for the sole purpose of obtaining a lower interest rate.  I expressed that I really liked doing business with my credit union and was hoping that they’d be able to lower my rate.  The customer service rep said that there wasn’t a direct way to lower the rate on the existing loan but she said she had a creative way of doing it.  She used the existing available line of credit to pay off the loan that I had and said that by doing that, it was creating a new loan which would have a rate that was .5% less than my existing loan.

She worked her magic and I actually watched it all play out via my online banking.  Now I’ve got a rate that is .5% less than I had at the beginning of the day so that more of my payment will go towards the priniciple and less will go toward interest.

I seriously doubt a commercial “for profit” bank would have done this for me…………

Happy Thanksgiving!!!