Credit Union is offering 1% rate reduction... do we refinance or wait?
My husband and I moved this last summer, so we've only had our current mortgage for under a year. The interest rate wasn't great (6.899%), but we were on a time limit since I was pregnant at the time, and figured we could refinance later when the rates (hopefully) dropped a bit. The purchase price was ~$500k, and we put 20% down, so the loan itself was ~$400k. Our monthly payment right now is affordable, but some more wiggle room in our budget would be ideal.
Our credit union has recently been advertising a 1% mortgage rate discount on any applications received until the end of June. They say the 1% discount is applied directly to current Fannie Mae base rates (30-year par pricing) at the time of approval. They are also offering 0.5% off their standard 1% loan origination fees.
This sounds like a good deal to us, but there are a few things that we were wondering about, which may or may not impact things:
- Since closing on our house last summer, my husband has gone back to school full-time, so we're currently down to a single income. My salary is ~$150k, so that's been do-able for us, but it does mean our income is lower than when we originally got our loan.
- My car died a few weeks ago (bad transmission, wasn't worth it to repair) so we ended up taking out a car loan for another one. We currently have 2 auto loans, but do plan on fully paying one off once the IRS finally processes our tax return (getting some money back from the adoption tax credit, but apparently it requires additional review because of that). However, I know the loan we just took our will impact our credit score, and take some time to recover. Also, we've had quite a bit of money coming out of our bank accounts this past month for the down payment, new tires, my husband's summer tuition, etc, so I'm not sure if it would look concerning on an application for our bank statements to have more coming out than going in this past month.
- I've heard some talk about rates possibly coming down when somebody takes some office sometime in the summer (US)? Idk, to be honest I'm not at all informed on what this is about, but it's just something a couple of people have told us might be worth waiting for.
So, given the above info.... is this 1% rate reduction from our credit union something worth looking into? Or would it be better to give it some time for our credit score to recover from the new car loan, our bank accounts to recover from the recent payments, the market rate to potentially come down a bit more, etc.