Totally. Our house is worth almost double what we paid for it before the pandemic. And during one of the lockdowns, we refinanced to a 15-year mortgage at the same monthly payment as our 30-year had been. All of which means that if we were trying to buy this year, we’d be paying four times as much over the span of the loan.
Golden handcuffs, though. We can’t move for the next ten years now. Thankfully we don’t want to.
newbeni@lemmy.world 5 months ago
What? Refinancing means you have to stay at the home and can’t sell?
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Not at all. We’re free to move whenever we like, legally. There’s nothing in the contract that says we can’t. But if we did, any mortgage we’d get wouldn’t have our current (really good) interest rate, and we’d have to pay post-2021 home prices for wherever we’d move to. Like I said, we’d end up paying four times as much over the span of the loan for an equivalently-priced home.
Which is a choice that we could make. But absent a really good reason to move that would offset that massive financial incentive to stay, we’re stuck here until we pay it off unless we’re willing to take that huge financial hit.