My Mortgage Renewal – Part 2

Earlier this week I posted the first part of this process, which was going through the original plan and seeing what I did or didn’t actually complete.  I was pleasantly surprised by the results.  I actually did do most of the list!

But, that post didn’t cover any of the specific details of our renewal, so I promised I would share that in another post.  So let’s get to it.

First up, let’s do a little background.  My husband and I bought our house in the December of 2013.  We bought it the first day on the market and though we paid slightly over asking price, we asked for a long closing time because we had to sell my townhouse and I still think we got a great deal.  So we moved in to the house in March of 2014.

The house itself was pretty clean, well maintained and livable, but definitely not updated.  We had big dreams of renovations, but had to wait a while before we could fund anything major.  But even without any updates to the house, the market has done what the market has done, and the value of the house has increased substantially.

As someone who reads a bunch of personal finance blogs, I know the popular opinion is not to go further in to debt for things like renovations.  But, my husband and I discussed it quite a lot, and we consider this house our forever home.  We aren’t worried about the value going down in a few years when we want to sell, because we won’t want to sell in a few years… We will be staying here as long as we can.  So, with that in mind, we want to make this house as perfect for us as we can now so that we can enjoy it for years and years to come.  I’m going to do some posts about our renovation plans soon, don’t worry.

So, let’s go over the details of our mortgage renewal…

Our original purchase price was $615,000.

Our old mortgage was sitting at $515,000 with an interest rate of 3.43%.

Our house was assessed at $842,000 market value 3 years after we bought it.

That means that we had about $327,000 of equity in our house.

So, we took $110,000 equity out of our house for our renovations.

And our new mortgage is $625,000 with a fixed interest rate of 2.34% for 5 years.

The equity still existing in our house is $217,000.

With the new lower rate and the higher mortgage, our monthly payments are pretty much staying exactly the same, which is great because that is what we were looking for.  We can comfortably afford the current payment and were looking to either decrease it or keep it the same.

The mortgage provider is not a bank this time, it is Street Capital. I can’t really offer any review or opinion of their services yet because we are still waiting to get our online login information. Should be coming in the mail soon.

So now we have about $110,000 to start on our renovations.  Hopefully we can do everything we want to do within that budget, but honestly, with moving walls around, and basically gutting a bunch of rooms, including the bathrooms and the kitchen, it might be tight.  But I can go over all that in another post.

So there you have it. The details of our mortgage renewal.  Anything I missed that you want to know about?

Are you surprised that I posted these numbers after I have been so careful about not including my numbers in my financial update posts?  Yeah, I am a bit surprised at myself too.  But, here they are, my mortgage and house value numbers… 

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