Mortgage shopping

 We we are about to close of our second refinance in as many years.   We bought our house with a 30yr @ 4.25% loan.  Then last year refi to a 15yr @ 3.25 which increased out monthly payment by 300ish. Really we didn't notice because we were already putting extra into our loan and didn't notice the difference. 

The only thing I hated about going to 15 was the less flexibility we had with the money. Opportunity missed, but paying off the home in 15 years sounded great.  So here we are a little more then a year later and we are at it again.  Got a couple of quotes and see if it was something we would do. We were thinking about going back to a 30 year loan to put more money in our pocket to help cover cost upcoming for this Covid year.  Anyway after shopping and negotiating we got to a 30yr @ 2.875% with a 2.9APR.  Which lowers our monthly payment by a whopping 👀 $1000 a month.  Yes the world is crazy. When things get crazy take advantage where you can.  Here is the funny thing.  Since we got a lower interest rate we could pay the exact same amount into the load and pay it off 14months soon and with $20k less in interest. 

 

How to do this and not lose your mind and just give up.  

• Know your current rate and amount you will need to finance.  
• Don't give out your SS just to get quotes.
• Know what your credit score is - look with up on one of the 100 sites if you don't know
• Be prepared to unfreeze your credit once you are ready to move forward.  

 

The most important part on picking a Mortgage shopping is being comfortable during the process.  This is a lot of money and if you don't feel like the are honest or making it easy on you move on.  Yes is may cost you money, but long term you will feel better about it.  Remember to not just go with lowest % look at the whole picture check APR% which is interest rate with the fee in.

What was important to me was, 1. Low interest rate and APR, 2. They wouldn't see my loan and I have to send my checks to someone else. I've heard horror stories of people missing payment because the company change and they didn't know. 3. Easy payment and service.  This is something these companies do all the time it should be smooth. 4. Don't have to give to much information to get a basic quote.  If they required credit checks and SS right away I moved on.  They should be able to give me an idea on fee and interest rates based on my loan and what I tell them my how good my credit is.  

So go out there get a couple of quotes. Don't try to time the market and be read when you make your choice.  Also get your best quote and go back to your current lender to see if they will match it.  Staying with the same company requires a lot of the same things as switching, but you don't have to worry about miss payment or a new system.  Good Luck!!

MINT and whats next - part 2

 Well it has been a week look at other tools beside MINT.  So far it's been tough and a lot of long days.

I first tried Personal Capital and I love it at first. I have been using it for a year to just track investments nothing else.  So I syn'd up all my account and went well. Love that it pull a few month and maybe in time the whole year.   Now the bad.   The budgeting part of this software is on the weak side.  Granted the main focus is tracking investments and keeping track of your financially allocation. So this was expect, but for what I want it for I was a no go.   Partial-fail - I will keep it as I was using it.  It was nice to have a place were all the other daily transactions were not clouding the investment picture. 

Second You Need a Budget (YNAB).  I jumped in and after watching a short video (which are amazing by the way) I basically matched my budget from MINT into YNAB. (Category based). Then imported all my account all worked except I havn't figured out how to make the accounts with CAPTCHA work better and the ones that require a PIN code from phone/email.  I really wanted to love this app. It has such a following and passion for the tool and budgeting.  I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it.  I'm used to seeing money come in and make sure I have enough cash in the checking to cover when the bills come in and if not I transfer from a savings account. 

 - Just discovered how I can put future reoccurring items in.  This helps a lot organizing. 

 

So far I don't know if I can give up MINT, but I'm going to keep going with YNAB to see what the roll over is like and going to sit down with my significant other to go over it.  

 

So sick of MINT

MINT RIP - you were great, then ok, not awful. 💣

 So I've been tracking my money since I started working at 15. Start out with MS Money until that was discontinued.  Was able to export that into Quicken.  

I liked Quicken for awhile because it was a lot more automated then MS Money and imports transaction was a lot less painful.  Eventually they added auto sync stuff to your accounts.  This big issue I ran into was one of my Credit Card wouldn't syn and things didn't always seem to work.  I know they had tax stuff in there, but it didn't seem realizable enough to use. Eventually I got sick of it not work correctly and all the manually work to get things to work. I moved to this cool new software called MINT

MINT is a online spending/budget tool.  It took awhile to go all in because I was very security focused and didn't like handing over my information to this unknown software.  After a year or so I started to trust it more and started to leave Quicken behind.  This tool was great an free.  All my accounts syn'd and for the most part the categories were correct.  The of course MINT became to good and free. Then in 2009 Intuit bought them.  I think they mostly did this because MINT was taking there business and it was better. 

So for the first 5 years or so MINT didn't change much just bug fixes and normal redesigns.  My guess the original development team was around the Intuit didn't get full control for a curtain amount of time.  Then the Intuit team took over.  You would expect better service and more security from a company like them. And they did. 😀  Then came the bad parts.  Ads started showing up and they starter to sell your data to help advertise and focus on your data.   I found the ads annoying and mostly I could work around for a great free product.  Then the bad started happening.  The rock solid syning started to fail.  In fact the checking account I've been using and categorizing started getting duplicates and going inactive off and on.  Then one day it just disappeared.  😱😱  So all this work was just gone.  Then the checking showed up on my wifes bank account, but duplicated.  One with only the last month expense and the other all the old data.  It's been like this for the past few months.   

I can't have unreliable software that I can't restore back to a good state. I'm using this software to budget and track expenses.  So with all the Ads and bad User experience for the past year or so I've reached a breaking point. I'm moving on.  Bye Bye MINT

I'm decided to go with either Personal Capital or YNAB.  I've been using Personal Cap. for about a year to just track Stocks and stuff for a rough net worth estimate.  While YNAB seems to be the go to app for people in the FI community.  I usually stay way from software I have to pay subscription services to.  I don't mind spending a one time buy, but not monthly.  Anyway I'm currently trying to setup both to see if I can transition to these. I was going to start with PC since I had some accounts already sync'd, but I ran into issue with it's retirement calculator not working correctly so I decided to try YNAB first. 

I need these tool to have these thing

Must:

• Secure
  
• Syncs with all my accounts
• Good User experience
• easy to use Budget tool. My wife is finally on board and need to keep her engaged
• Easy translations tracking automated as mush as possible. I don't want to keep having to change the same places to the same categories everyday.
  
• inexpensive (free is best)
• staying power
  

So far  YNAB has all the thing I want. 

1. Security and uses two-factor auth plus and using latest iPhone auth features
   
2. All my accounts sync with there service. I have one weird card that isn't supported by all
3. able to import all my transactions from MINT or the Bank software :) Major plus
4. Easy user interface. Wife needs to be able to understand
5. budgets
   
6. 34 day free trial 
   

Negatives so far 

1. Have to relearn how to setup budget since they do it a little different. All dollars get a job
   
2. $$$ 7-11 a month
3. Budget is the main focus as you would expect from a app called "You Need A Budget". It takes a couple of seconds to get to transaction screens
4. When you setup your accounts it comes in fresh with only current balance. It doesn't go back and get previous transactions. *plus above is a workaround - so for me at least for my checking account and Chase accounts only a minor thing.
   

 

Personal Capital - still need to evaluate with transactions and credit cards

Pluses so far

1. Good Auth using latest IPhone features. 
   
2. clean user interface similar enough to MINT that not hunting for features.
3. Sync up to a year in the past 
4. Big focus on net work and investing
   

Minuses so far

1. bug in there retirement calculator  
2. Advertisements for there CPA advice
3. They use the aggregated data (anonymous style) on account for there needs
4. Budget section has a lot to be desired.  You basically set total you expect to spend and you are given an arrow and color when you are above or below that mark.  It does give you a break down by % on what you've spent your funds on.  
• I don't like this. Mostly because it's harder to tell if we go over on an area. Like hey we budget $100 on water in a month and it's at $300. Maybe we have a problem at the house. This is obvious on MINT and YNAB, while on PC it may get lost since I'm below my budget.
• Budgeting is very much an after thought for this software. Kind of a widget some intern created and then left the company.  They though it was ok and just left it at that.

 

A couple of days in has been disappointing.  I really wanted to love YNAB. I do like it, but it has to blow me away to have me pay.  Personal Capital: budgeting section is very disappointing.  MINT is looking better 😖.   I've going to running all three for a month YNAB. or PC can answer all my needs. As of today PC looks to be a place I will only keep my stock tracking/network and not track transaction or budget let see if it can change my mine.  While YNAB has some work today to makeup for the price tag.   

 

 

Organization through chaos

This is completely self inflicted and a little crazy.  I've completely overloaded myself with what I call life financial maintenance. 

Like every owner of a home should do. I have a calendar event every year to check insurance rates. This mostly has me going to 5 or 6 major companies and putting in my information to match my current coverage.  Then comparing rates and going with the lowest, which is usually the current company.  The annoying part is the amount of email and phone calls we get doing this.

Something different happened this year instead of just getting the usually email/phone calls I got a quote in my email from one of the companies this a significantly lower rate in the amount of $1200 per year.  This isn't new and mostly a trick. The usually have this low quote and have high deductibles or lower coverage.  In this case is was spot on.  I emailed the agent back said I was interested and had a couple of question.  Unfortunately for me he wanted to talk on the phone to discuss options and to make sure I had the right coverage.   This is great for the agent. I don't really like it one I really don't like talking on the phone and two it is easy to see costs on the screen vs on the phone. 

Once I got this all figured out I contacted by current company to see if they could match it.  They couldn't so I switch.  Switching car and umbrella is easy.  Escrow is a little trickier specially if you get unlucky like I did and mortgage company pays your next years insurance right after you switched.  Now I have to pay the refund game and get a refund from my old company, make sure the new insurance is paid, and probably refund my escrow.   What a pain.  What I get to waiting until the last minute to change though.

While I was doing this I was also looking to refinance my mortgage again. We are planning on going back to a 30 year loan to be able to get extra cash in our pocket.  This is it's own topic on issues and best way to avoid. Always good to have two good quotes to have the companies compete with.

If this wasn't enough we were also looking at hiring a nanny this year, because the kids will be doing school from home this year.  - wow the things I learned from this experience.

Since all of these things were very time sensitive I was definitely feeling the pressure.  I used excel sheet to help me track the cost and which options were best.  I highly recommend to do something similar. Take a deep breath and relax.