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Refinancing Your Home Equity Loan Or Refinancing Your Home Equity Line Of Credit

Ask yourself these questions before you refinance your home equity loan or line of credit:

1. How Much Will it Cost to Refinance? – Figure the costs of refinancing and the increase or decrease in interest rate over the course of the loan. There are many refinance calculators available online that you can use for free to help you calculate whether or not the cost is worth it.

2. Are You Refinancing For More Favorable Loan Terms? – Sometimes people refinance for better loan terms, like a fixed rate, a shorter term, like from 30 to 15 years to payoff. Sometimes, if refinancing doesn’t necessarily save you much money, but you are moving to better loan terms, it can be worth doing the refinance anyway.

3. Are you including the loans closing costs in the loan balance? – If so, realize that not only are you paying those closing costs, but you are also paying the interest on those closing costs over time. Make sure you add those numbers into your calculations when figuring whether or not it’s worth refinancing. Add the interest costs and payments for the rest of your current home equity term and compare them to the interest costs of the proposed refinance loan. This will help you determine if there is a worthwhile savings.

4. Will you need your home equity line of credit in the future? – There are definitely benefits to having a home equity line of credit available to you in the future. If you don’t have much in savings, and have money available in your home equity line of credit, you may want to consider keeping it. If you refinance it, then if you run on hard times and need to borrow money from your home’s equity, you will have to take out a new home equity line of credit. You might not have the option of taking out a new home equity line of credit when you need one.

There are many ways to allocate the funds you receive under the terms of a personal loan. One of the most popular uses for such loans is to eliminate debt. A personal loan offers a great alternative for individuals who are struggling to make monthly payments on too many accounts. The idea is to pay off such debt with a personal loan, then only have one monthly payment to make.

The monthly payment is often much less than you were paying before on all your outstanding debts. Having only one loan payment can also improve your credit score. This is especially true if the other debt was mainly credit card debt with the balance being very close to the credit limit.

The first step is to make a list of all of your outstanding debt. Make columns for information including the creditor, the balance due, and the interest rate. In the last column calculate the total amount you will pay on that debt making your current payments. There are great calculators to get this information online. These calculators are free and easy to use. To do this, simply type in the balance, interest rate, and monthly payment. In many cases you will be shocked to see how much that debt is going to end up costing you.

Once you have completed that task, add up the totals in each column. You will need to know the balance due to pay off the debt as this is the amount you will need your personal loan to be for. You also want to remember that overall cost total. It is very important that before you agree to the terms of a personal loan that you have made sure the overall cost of that loan will be considerably less than if you continue to make minimum payments on the debt you already have.

If the cost is fairly close or more, than dont take out the personal loan. It will do more damage to your current situation than good. Find out what the monthly payment will be as well. Imagine your shock if it ends up being more than what you are currently paying out.

This is a good time to take a realistic look at the reason why you have debt that you are having a hard time meeting the monthly payments for. It may be due to a change in circumstances that you had no control over. However, if the reason is that you have poor spending habits then you need to address this issue before taking out a personal loan. Nothing is more upsetting than getting a personal loan to cover your debt, then realize six months down the road that you have ran up a large amount of debt again. The situation with be much more grim now because in addition to paying off that debt you also have a personal loan payment to cover each month.

Enrolling in a debt management course or budgeting class can help you identify areas where you are not using your income wisely. There are also many excellent online resources to assist you. A good exercise is to have every family member write down all the money they spend over a weeks time. You will be amazed to see the pattern of things that are draining your wallet during this exercise, including that daily cup of coffee and eating on the run. This is a great way to get all family members involved in the budgeting process as well as involved in finding better ways to manage money.

Personal loans can be a great way to eliminate other types of debt if used correctly. It is your responsibility to do your homework first. Make sure taking out a personal loan to cover your other debt is going to offer you a solution, not result in more financial stress.

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