The past few months have been pretty tumultuous. I'm no longer selling my house. The main reason I was doing it was to move in with my boyfriend, and we both realized it wasn't a good idea for many, many reasons.
Although the economic benefits for me would have been great on a short-term basis, in the long run I was very anxious about not having equity (not to mention indepence, my own space, etc...). Since I've made the decision to stay, I feel like I had betrayed my house, which always stood by me, and kept me warm and safe. We're making up now. :)
My friends at Countrywide (they hold my mortgage) keep sending me refinance letters, which I have studiously ignored. However this time, I called to see what they could do for me. And surprise surprise, they can actually do quite a lot!
I'm going to re-finance at a lower interest rate (down from 6.237 to 5.78), and roll in my home equity loan ($14k), and the remaining credit card I have ($10,000 -- I've been living off it the past month). Due to an escrow shortage and applying rollover to the credit card, my monthly payments for those three bills had been $2200. My new monthly mortgage payment will be $1600.
Honestly, I don't even know where I came up with the $2200 each month -- eating lots of beans and finding odd jobs here and there helped. This lower payment will give me a lot of relief.
I still have the $73k in student loans to deal with, but I'm going to defer them for another year. I'm hoping for an increase in income through my business -- it's an ongoing hope... but with no other debt than a mortgage and student loans, I feel like I'll be in a good place psychologically. Plus, if worse comes to worst, the value of my house is still about equal to the total debt I owe.
So look for more posts from me about low-cost historic homeowner ideas!
