So this is the much promised post about the big financial change that we have made.  I have hinted at this post on several occasions but did not want to share until everything was complete and final. The reason for this post is very personal, I want to be able to read this in the future, see my rationale and also determine if it worked or not.

We have refinanced the house and rolled the HELOC into it. First the facts, this is a 15 year mortgage with an interest rate of 6.25%. the anticipated maturity date is December 2040. Our age would be 68.

Next, why we choose to re-finance at this time. There are two main reasons that we looked at refinancing now. The first of which is that we or at least I have started to seriously look at and begin to plan for retirement. My top priority going into retirement is to be debt-free. I do not want to have any payments such as mortgage or car. The auto part is really something that I can’t control as much as the mortgage/HELCO.  I knew going in the HELOC was 30 years and my initial plan was to begin making double payments when we pay off the Tahoe in October 26.  The second reason for considering and seriously looking at a re-fi now is that the HELCO was an adjustable rate.  I don’t recall reading this so maybe I missed it. I realized this (my mistake) because the HELCO was a fixed rate for 12 months and then became adjustable. My realization occurred with the notice that it would increase to over 7%.

The problem…. our mortgage was refinanced during COVID at a rate of 2.75%. This has been the one down side and thing that made the decision to re-fi difficulty for me. But when you compare the fact that the HELCO was already high and had the possibility of going even higher then even math said we should re-fi.

We ended up including some cash out when we decided to re-finance in order to reduce our overall debit load and to make paying everything much easier and quicker.  As I mentioned above the interest rate is 6.25% which is less than any credit card at this point.  We will begin making payments on January 1 2026 and begin to make an extra  principal only payment November 2026 which should reduce our term to 8 years or 2034 and our age to 62.