Do I have to repay the First-Time Homebuyers tax credit if I refinance?
The Homebuyers Tax Credit was unrelated to whether or not a mortgage was part of the purchase. You will have no issue with this credit if you refinance. No. As long as you live in the house for 3 years, it's yours to keep. Financing has nothing to do with that.
"Concise answers to your questions: Depends on the loan and the bank; when you ""accelerate"" repayment of a loan by applying a pre-payment balance to the principal, your monthly payment may be reduced. However, standard practice for most loan types is that the repayment schedule will be accelerated; you'll pay no less each month, but you'll pay it off sooner. I can neither confirm nor deny that an internship counts as job experience in the field for the purpose of mortgage lending. It sounds logical, especially if it were a paid internship (in which case you'd just call it a ""job""), but I can't be sure as I don't know of anyone who got a mortgage without accruing the necessary job experience post-graduation. A loan officer will be happy to talk to you and answer specific questions, but if you go in today, with no credit history (the student loan probably hasn't even entered repayment) and a lot of unknowns (an offer can be rescinded, for instance), you are virtually certain to be denied a mortgage. The bank is going to want evidence that you will make good on the debt you have over time. One $10,000 payment on the loan, though significant, is just one payment as far as your credit history (and credit score) is concerned. Now, a few more reality checks: $70k/yr is not what you'll be bringing home. As a single person without dependents, you'll be taxed at the highest possible withholdings rate. Your effective tax rate on $70k, depending on the state in which you live, can be as high as 30% (including all payroll/SS taxes, for a 1099 earner and/or an employee in a state with an income tax), so you're actually only bringing home 42k/yr, or about $1,600/paycheck if you're paid biweekly. To that, add a decent chunk for your group healthcare plan (which, as of 2014, you will be required to buy, or else pay another $2500 - effectively another 3% of gross earnings - in taxes). And even now with your first job, you should be at least trying to save up a decent chunk o' change in a 401k or IRA as a retirement nest egg. That student loan, beginning about 6 months after you leave school, will cost you about $555/mo in monthly payments for the next 10 years (if it's all Stafford loans with a 50/50 split between sub/unsub; that could be as much as $600/mo for all-unsub Stafford, or $700 or more for private loans). If you were going to pay all that back in two years, you're looking at paying a ballpark of $2500/mo leaving just $700 to pay all your bills and expenses each month. With a 3-year payoff plan, you're turning around one of your two paychecks every month to the student loan servicer, which for a bachelor is doable but still rather tight. Your mortgage payment isn't the only payment you will make on your house. If you get an FHA loan with 3.5% down, the lender will demand PMI. The city/county will likely levy a property tax on the assessed value of land and building. The lender may require that you purchase home insurance with minimum acceptable coverage limits and deductibles. All of these will be paid into escrow accounts, managed by your lending bank, from a single check you send them monthly. I pay all of these, in a state (Texas) that gets its primary income from sales and property tax instead of income, and my monthly payment isn't quite double the simple P&I. Once you have the house, you'll want to fill the house. Nice bed: probably $1500 between mattress and frame for a nice big queen you can stretch out on (and have lady friends over). Nice couch: $1000. TV: call it $500. That's probably the bare minimum you'll want to buy to replace what you lived through college with (you'll have somewhere to eat and sleep other than the floor of your new home), and we're already talking almost a month's salary, or payments of up to 10% of your monthly take-home pay over a year on a couple of store credit cards. Plates, cookware, etc just keeps bumping this up. Yes, they're (theoretically) all one-time costs, but they're things you need, and things you may not have if you've been living in dorms and eating in dining halls all through college. The house you buy now is likely to be a ""starter"", maybe 3bed/2bath and 1600 sqft at the upper end (they sell em as small as 2bd/1bt 1100sqft). It will support a spouse and 2 kids, but by that point you'll be bursting at the seams. What happens if your future spouse had the same idea of buying a house early while rates were low? The cost of buying a house may be as little as 3.5% down and a few hundred more in advance escrow and a couple other fees the seller can't pay for you. The cost of selling the same house is likely to include all the costs you made the seller pay when you bought it, because you'll be selling to someone in the same position you're in now. I didn't know it at the time I bought my house, but I paid about $5,000 to get into it (3.5% down and 6 months' escrow up front), while the sellers paid over $10,000 to get out (the owner got married to another homeowner, and they ended up selling both houses to move out of town; I don't even know what kind of bath they took on the house we weren't involved with). I graduated in 2005. I didn't buy my first house until I was married and pretty much well-settled, in 2011 (and yes, we were looking because mortgage rates were at rock bottom). We really lucked out in terms of a home that, if we want to or have to, we can live in for the rest of our lives (only 1700sqft, but it's officially a 4/2 with a spare room, and a downstairs master suite and nursery/office, so when we're old and decrepit we can pretty much live downstairs). I would seriously recommend that you do the same, even if by doing so you miss out on the absolute best interest rates. Last example: let's say, hypothetically, that you bite at current interest rates, and lock in a rate just above prime at 4%, 3.5% down, seller pays closing, but then in two years you get married, change jobs and have to move. Let's further suppose an alternate reality in which, after two years of living in an apartment, all the same life changes happen and you are now shopping for your first house having been pre-approved at 5%. That one percentage point savings by buying now, on a house in the $200k range, is worth about $120/mo or about $1440/yr off of your P&I payment ($921.42 on a $200,000 home with a 30-year term). Not chump change (over 30 years if you had been that lucky, it's $43000), but it's less than 5% of your take-home pay (month-to-month or annually). However, when you move in two years, the buyer's probably going to want the same deal you got - seller pays closing - because that's the market level you bought in to (low-priced starters for first-time homebuyers). That's a 3% commission for both agents, 1% origination, 0.5%-1% guarantor, and various fixed fees (title etc). Assuming the value of the house hasn't changed, let's call total selling costs 8% of the house value of $200k (which is probably low); that's $16,000 in seller's costs. Again, assuming home value didn't change and that you got an FHA loan requiring only 3.5% down, your down payment ($7k) plus principal paid (about another $7k; 6936.27 to be exact) only covers $14k of those costs. You're now in the hole $2,000, and you still have to come up with your next home's down payment.  With all other things being equal, in order to get back to where you were in net worth terms before you bought the house (meaning $7,000 cash in the bank after selling it), you would need to stay in the house for 4 and a half years to accumulate the $16,000 in equity through principal payments. That leaves you with your original $7,000 down payment returned to you in cash, and you're even in accounting terms (which means in finance terms you're behind; that $7,000 invested at 3% historical average rate of inflation would have earned you about $800 in those four years, meaning you need to stick around about 5.5 years before you ""break even"" in TVM terms). For this reason, I would say that you should be very cautious when buying your first home; it may very well be the last one you'll ever buy. Whether that's because you made good choices or bad is up to you." "Congratulations on recognizing your problem and getting serious about paying down your debt. That's the first step. If you have a loan with 80% interest, yes, get that paid off as quickly as possible. Much better to be paying even the outrageous 20% on a credit card than the astounding 80%. As others have noted, if you can get a consolidation loan or refinance that 80% to something more realistic, do it and do it as soon as possible. Heck, if you have the credit limit, use the credit card to off the 80% loan. 20% on a credit card is better than 80%. Of course you may not have enough credit limit to do that. Cash-back rewards are nice if you are paying off the credit card balance each month. But in your case, you're not. 25% with a 2% cash back reward means you're still paying 23% the first month and 25% every month after that. That's worse than 20%. Remember you pay the interest on your balance every month that you don't pay it off, while a cash-back is a one-time thing. So if you're not going to pay off the balance, AT BEST a cash back reward could be effectively subtracted from the interest rate. 20% with a 2% cashback is effectively somewhere between 18% and 20%. If you're comparing 20% with 2% cashback to 19%, could be complicated to figure out which is better. But it's clearly worse than anything more than 20%. Besides that, you don't say what your total debt is in relation to your income. If you have a lot of debt, I'd say first thing is to figure out what you can do to cut your expenses. Lots of things that people call ""fixed expenses"" aren't really fixed at all, they just take some effort to cut. Like if you have a big expensive house and you're paying a large mortgage, you can (probably) cut that by selling the place and moving to a cheaper house. (I say ""probably"" because the housing market may make it impossible to sell for enough to improve your situation.) If you have large heating bills, you can turn the thermostat down and get used to wearing a sweater around the house. Etc.  Final note: I've talked to a fair number of people with debt problems, and I often hear them say, ""Yes, I really need to cut my spending and start paying off these debts. And I intend to ... right after I buy this one last thing that I really really want."" But of course after that there's one more vital purchase, and then another, etc. Avoid falling into this trap." my wife and I own a 2 br/2 bath house on .25 acres in western MA.  We were able to refinance it and now pay about $400 a month in mortgage, and another $350 in taxes each month.  Insurance is $50.    We grow our own produce during the spring/summer/fall and put up a lot of canned stuff and whatnot in October.  We don't eat much meat.  I make about $20k/yr teaching music.  Our 2 year old doesn't go to daycare.  I care for him during the day and pay a babysitter in the evening while I teach.  My wife is a cook and earns slightly more than me.  Our combined income is about $42k/year.  We have savings, investments and no debt.  We do not use credit cards.  We don't shop for the latest gadgets and gizmos.  We look for bargains wherever possible, we go without and we do a lot of barter.  See it is possible to do it.  It takes hard work and creativity "This is not a full answer and I have no personal finance experience. But I have a personal story as I did this. As Vicky stated Another point: there are various schemes available to help first time   buyers. By signing up for this, you would exclude yourself from any of   those schemes in the future. I did this for my dad when I was 16 or so. I am in Canada and lost $5,000 first time buyers tax rebate. As long as many other bonuses like using your rsps for your first home. I also am having a fair amount of trouble getting a credit card, because even though I am only a part member of the mortgage they expect you to be able to cover the whole thing. So when the banks look at my income of say $3000 a month they say ""3000 - rent(500) - mortgage(3000)"" You make $-500 a month. I then explain that I do not actually pay the mortage so it is not coming out of my paycheck. They do not care. I am responsible for full payments and they consider it used." "The Answer is yes according to multiple online sources and my local bank. This approach is a common technique to building your own home. You finance the land, build the simplest possible dwelling (say a garage with 1 bathroom/bedroom), refi into a mortgage and get cash back and then build your ""real house"" or add on, etc. This eliminates the banks demands that come with a ""construction loan"" and saves you 10s of thousands in the process (fees, contractors, scheduling, design, etc)" There is another factor to consider when refinancing is the remaining term left on your loan.  If you have 20 years left, and you re-fi into another 30 year loan that extends the length that you will be paying off the house for another 10 years.  You are probably better off going with 20, or even 15.  If this is a new loan, that is less of an issue, although if you moving and buying a house in a similar price range it is still something to consider.  My goal is to have my house paid off before I retire (hopefully early semi-retirement around 55). You will need to check the language of your sales contract. Most of the time, it will be written that the pro-rated property taxes will be part of closing costs. In general, If you've already paid taxes, then the buyer will pay you the pro-rated portion of that, from the closing date through the end of the year. If you haven't, then you would usually be charged the pro-rated amount to be held in the buyer's mortgage company escrow account, with the remainder being collected from the buyer at a later date. For your income tax purposes, you can deduct that tiny amount of the paid property taxes from your income (assuming itemized deductions). Doing some research on property tax for the state of Georgia brings up this interesting note: If you owned property on January 1, you are responsible for the ad valorem tax for the entire year even if you sell the property on January 2.  Georgia law does not allow a refund for partial year residents. This leads me to believe that your sales contract would have it written in that the buyer paid you almost the entire year's property taxes in anticipation that you would be responsible for the property taxes, as you owned the property on January 1st. Again, you should consult with the settlement attorney and review your contract. I have the mortgage from Lender A. Can I get a HELOC from Lender B? Yes. Do banks pull my credit to approve a HELOC account? Yes. How is it reported to the credit bureaus and how does it affect my credit (Let's say my limit is $30k and I use all of $30k)?  It is reported as HELOC and the current balance. Similar to credit cards (in fact, some banks report it exactly as credit cards). Anything unique about it's tax deduction? Same as mortgage, except that the limit is $100K unless used for home improvement. Anything else to watch out for? LTV - Loan to Value. This is the ratio of your overall home value to the indebtedness secured by the home. Currently, your LTV is 93% (you have 7% equity). For HELOC, most banks require the LTV, including the HELOC, not to exceed 75%. So the chances you'll get a HELOC are pretty slim.