i’m busy really busy two kids fulltime job busy so the last thing i wanted to do was deal with a refinance the paperwork the annoying emails from the bank until i did the math even though my original mortgage rate was reasonable 36 shortening my loan term and lowering the rate to 262 some 15year refi rates are around 25 and some 30year rates are around 3 was going to yield me about 60000 in savings over the life of the loan was it a lot of paperwork to refi yep but that 60000 is going to help pay for college for my kids here’s what i learned from the process and what others who did the same shared with me too it can be worth it to refi even if you have a pretty low rate already our rate was already below 4 but it still was worth it to refinance we shortened our loan term to 15 years and we dropped our rate by nearly a point holden lewis of nerdwallet told marketwatch picks recently that the general rule of thumb is that refinancing is worth if you can shorten your loan term andor can reduce your interest rate by threequarters of a percentage point and you plan to stay in the home for at least a few years to recoup all of the costs associated with a refi shorten your loan term if you can this was a huge savings for us we had about 25 years left on our existing mortgage and shortened the term to 15 years this raised our monthly payments a bit but not more than we could manage and the savings are going to be significant over the life of the loan it’s easy to forget about discount points which are basically a form of prepaid interest when you refinance but they can pay off one discount point costs roughly 1 of your loan total so one point on a 300000 loan costs 3000 you’ll get about a 025 reduction in your interest rate per point that you buy for us buying points made sense because we had the cash saved up to pay them upfront and we knew we’d be in our house for a long time here’s a guide to who should and should not buy discount points yes there is a lot of paperwork… i knew there would be and yet it still surprised me w2s bank statements mortgage statements tax returns we supplied it all my husband runs his own business so that came with a whole other set of requests for his pl statements and business tax returns it took some time but we just broke it up gathering all the items up into manageable chunks of time over a couple weeks and got it done …but the feeling of not handing over money to the bank unnecessarily is pretty awesome i dreaded the process of a refi and yeah at times it was annoying the bank asking us for items we’d already submitted the first appraiser saying he couldn’t come for 45 days but the savings feel damn good that’s 60000 i’m paying myself and not the bank and i sure do like the sound of that