Mortgage refinancing fees
tl;dr: I think you can find a much better deal. Doing a strait refi will cost you some amount of money.  However, a 2.5% fee ont top of closing costs seems really high.  You can get a quote from Quicken loans pretty quick and compare their fee.  Also I would check with a local bank, preferably one you already do business with.  The 2.5% is probably their commission for originating the loan.  If you are in the Southeast I have had great luck with Regions bank.  They are large enough, but also small enough.  Please know that I have no affiliation with either company. BTW the rate also seems high.  Doing a quick search of Bank Rate, it seems you can get 3.25% with zero fee as of this writing.  The worse deal they show is 3.46 with a .75% fee, much better than you were quoted. If you can afford it I would also encourage you to think outside the box.  A client of mine was able to obtain a Home Equity Loan (not line of credit) to replace their mortgage.  They went for a 7 year pay off, with the loan in first position, at a rate about .75 below the then current 15 year rate.  The key was there was zero closing costs.  It saved them quite a bit of money. Also look at a 10 year fixed.  It might not be much more than you are paying now. "tl;dr: I agree with Pete B.'s assertion that you should continue shopping. That's not the whole story though; there are other factors that can raise your rate, and affect your closing costs. The published rate is typically the best rate you can get. Here are some other factors that can raise your rate: You should have received a loan estimate which will itemize the fees you will pay. On that document you will see if you are paying a price to ""buy down"" the rate, and all the other fees. How are you calculating the 2.5%? Note that some fees are fixed. An appraisal on a $40K home may cost the same as an appraisal for a $400K home. If you add up the total closing costs and view it as a percentage of the loan, the smaller loan may have a higher percentage than the larger loan, even though the total cost of the smaller loan is less." "2.5%? Whoa, you are being robbed there.  Straight-up, stripped-down, and bent-over-a-table robbed. Never agree to ""fees"".  If they don't want to do the work to give you a loan, there are other lenders who do. Rarely agree to ""points"".  If you know -- and I don't mean ""think"", I mean ""know"" -- if you know that you are going to hold that loan much longer than it would take to repay those points, then maybe.  For example, if they are charging one point to lower your rate 0.25%, you want to be totally sure you will stay in the house at least four years, and probably more like six or eight years before moving or refinancing. It's more-or-less OK to pay for the appraisal.  If something goes wrong with the loan application, the appraisal will be valid for a few more months, you can try again. I once had 14% cash for a down-payment.  The loan officer said if I could come up with 15%, the rate would be reduced by 0.25%.  To get the money, I took a ""reverse point"", which paid me 1% but raised my the rate by 0.25%. The loan officer, who wasn't too bright, asked, ""Why did you do that?  The two things cancel each other out."" ""I did it,"" I explained, ""because you paid me 1% of the value of my house to sign my name twice."""
"The problem is not the credit score; it is the ""competing"" inquiries. Multiple inquiries will be considered as one if done withing a short time period (2 month, IIRC) and for the same kind of credit, because people do shop for rates, you're not the first one to do that. So don't worry about that. What you should be worrying about is banks asking questions about these inquiries, which is an annoying (at least for me) technicality. You'll have to explain to each of the banks that you want a pre-approval from that you're going to take the mortgage from them, and not from anyone else. In writing, with your signature notarized. Which is OK because it's done (the signature and notarizing) at closing, but you'll have to ""convince"" them that they're the chosen ones to get approved. Other than that it's pretty simple. I've done that (including the declaration that I'm not going to take any loans based on the other ""competing"" inquiries), and it worked fine when I took the original mortgage, and when I refinanced it later in a similar ""shopping"" fashion. Do it closer to the actual bidding, because closing does take at least 3-4 weeks, and the rate lock is usually for 30-60 days, so not much time to shop if you take that road." "I doubt you will get an answer equal to ""You can't save when you have debt"". Because most mortgages are for decades, very few people would be able to save for retirement if they had to wait to be mortgage free. The difficulty in saving occurs when the interest rate is very high (18% or more) and the interest is not deductible. Such as with credit cards. The minimum payment for your mortgage is 30% of your income. If that doesn't include taxes and homeowners insurance in the 30%, then for the United States that would be considered too large. While the general plan to pay down the mortgage is a good idea, make sure that you are able to handle the minimum payments before starting to increase the payments. Try the minimum for a year or two before getting aggressive The calculation is based on the interest rate of the mortgage, the interest rate of the savings account, and the potential tax deduction of the mortgage and the tax rate on the earned interest. Putting extra money into a mortgage, but missing out on matching retirement money would also have to be figured into the calculation. Make sure you do save for retirement , kids education, and emergencies. Unless your country has a complex system where the money can flow in and out of the mortgage, then once you put extra money into the mortgage you can't get it back when the car dies.  The nice thing about putting extra money into a mortgage is that you can do it either in an organized way, or only when you feel comfortable. So it is not urgent for you to commit to a plan immediately. One thing to avoid is a plan that charges you a fee to add extra money, or charges a fee to switch to a bi-weekly mortgage. While your ideas is good, these plans should never cost any money to start, and may be a scam if a 3rd party gets between you and the lender." You have the 2 properties, and even though the value of property B is less than the amount you owe on it hopefully you have some equity in propery A. So if you do have enough equity in property A, why don't you just go to the one lender and get both property A and B refinanced under the same mortgage. This way hopefully the combined equity in both properties would be enough to cover the full amount of the loan, and you have the opportunity to refinance at favourable rate and terms. Sounds like you are in the USA with an interest rate of 3.25%, I am in Australia and my mortgage rates are currently between 6.3% to 6.6%. Your mortgage represents a negative cash flow of $X for N months. The typical mortgage prepayment doesn't reduce your next payment, but does reduce the length of the mortgage. If you look at the amortization table of a 30 year loan, you might see a payment of $1000 but only $50 going to principal. So if on day one you send an extra $51 or so to the bank, you find that in 30 years you just saved that $1000 payment. In effect, it was a long term bond or CD, yielding the post tax rate of the mortgage. Say your loan were 7%. At 7%, money doubles every 10 years or so. 30 years is 3 doubles or 8X. If I were to offer you $1000 and ask for $7500 in 30 years, you might accept it, with an agreement to buy me out if you refinanced. For me, that would be an investment. Just like buying a bond. In fact, there is a real return, as you see the cash flow at the end. The payments 'not made' are your payback.  Those who insist it's not an investment are correct in the strict sense of the word's definition, but pedantic for the fact in practice, the prepayment is a choice to be considered alongside other investment choices. When I have a mortgage, I am the mortgagor, the bank, the mortgagee. Same as a company issuing a bond, the Bank holds my bond and I'm making payments to them. They hold my bond as an investment. There is no question of that. In fact, they package these and sell them as CMOs, groups of mortgages. A pre-payment is me buying back the last coupon on my mortgage. I fail to see the distinction between me 'buying back' $10K in future coupons on my own loan or me investing $10K in someone else's loans.  The real question for me is whether this makes sense when rates are so low. At 4%, I'd say it's a matter of prioritizing any high rate debt and any other investments that might yield more. But even so, it's an investment yielding 4%.  Over the years, I've developed the priorities of where to put new money - The priorities are debatable. I have my opinion, and my reasons to back them up. In general, it's a balance between risk and return. In my opinion, there's something wrong with ignoring a dollar for dollar match on the 401(k) in most circumstances. Others seem to prefer being 100% debt free before saving at all. There's a balance that might be different for each individual. As I started, the mortgage is a fixed return, with no chance to just get it back if needed. If your cash savings is pretty high, and the choice is a .001% CD or prepay a 4% mortgage, I'd use some funds to pay it down. But not to the point you have no liquid reserves. Does it cost money to refi? I know there are quite a few deals out there, I refi'd in June for $500, not bad. But sometimes can cost couple grand. If so, you have up front costs, plus the cost of the personal loan, that probably would break even at some point after your refi, but at what point? Will you sell before then, or even think about it? Or would you break even next year, then its a no brainer. As mentioned by others, do the numbers. In my county one can pay your taxes up front, or pay a fee and then pay in 2 installments.  I caught countrywide mortgages paying the fee (from my escrow account) then paying the 2 installments so that they could keep the interest over the 6 months.  After that I've always insisted on not having an escrow account. "You can definitely do it. But: Refinancing would make more sense to you, you can refinance at no cost and get rates below 4%, so you'll be saving 1% a year, without paying anything extra. If you pay the fees you'll get even lower rates, but then you need to check whether its worth it. I've just refinanced to a 15 years fixed mortgage at no cost a couple of months ago, and got 3.875% rate (in California), so its definitely worth looking into, don't just dismiss it. This will limit your flexibility though, because paying 30yrs loan ""as if"" is much more flexible than committing on 15yes loan - you can always go back to your original payments if you want to spread it out a bit more. You can add a HELOC once you've accumulated some equity to back you up, that's what I did." Assuming that partial payments are held (without interest) until enough money has accumulated to make at least a full payment, and assuming that overpayments are applied toward principal, a strategy of making three $ 96.00 payments per month will shorten your amortization period by less than one month.  These calculations assume that the interest rate is 12.5 percent APR, compounded monthly (with an APY of 13.2416 percent). Instead of 71 payments of $ 285.56 plus a final payment of $ 285.38, you would make the equivalent of 71 payments of $ 288.00 plus a final payment of $ 28.10. If you make one $ 96.00 payment every ten days, you will make an average of 36.5… partial payments per year, instead of 36 partial payments per year.  This will speed up your loan amortization by about another month-and-a-half over the course of the 72 month loan.  One month of shortening is due to the extra principal payments, and the other half-month is due to interest savings.   To a second approximation, this strategy is similar to paying $ 292.00 per month for 69 months plus a final payment of $ 195.38.  In other words, this strategy will probably involve about 212 payments of $ 96.00 each, possibly with a small 213th payment.