The title says it all.
I'm working through a home mortgage from about five years ago. The initial mortgage rate was good, and I refinanced two years later to a slightly lower interest rate. About once a year, I revisit the issue to see if I can get a better deal; and for the past three years, I've found that rates are going up and there's no better offer on the table.
So I ran across this Reddit ad:
HARP is going to expire in 2018. If you own a home and owe less than $679,650, use Congress's free refi program. The program itself is totally free and doesn't add any cost to your refi. Calculate how much your payment could be reduced by. (See Savings For Free).
...and decided to check it out, suspecting to find nothing. Well, I was right: all of the rates are higher. To my surprise, I also find that every offer tacked on $6k or more in new fees.
I see the subtle disclaimer in the ad above: "The program itself is totally free..." - i.e., banks are welcome to invoke the "free" program and then tack on whatever new fees they want, including fees that completely consume whatever savings the program conferred. But even so, the ad seems to go overboard to suggest that the offer is free, which runs contrary to all of the new fees tacked on by each and every lender.
Just curious what /r/personalfinance thinks of this.
Submitted November 12, 2018 at 12:08PM by sfsdfd https://ift.tt/2OHK42Z
