What are Mortgage Points? Should I Pay Them?
by Terrie J. Burd
First of all, what exacty are points? In simple terms, points are paid by a borrower to a lender to reduce the rate on a mortgage. One point is 1% of the loan. In other words, if you are required to pay 1 point, this means you have to pay $1,000 on a $100,000 loan.
Basically, such points lower the stated rate on the mortgage. Each lender has a different formula for calculating the value of points, but one example would be if you had to pay one and a half points to lower the interest rate of your loan from 6.25% to 5.875% or pay 2.75 points to reduce it to 5.375%.
The test is how long you plan on living in the home since the cost of the points goes down as time passes. Borrowing to pay points makes no sense, since the idea is to save interest, not pay it. For many first time home buyers, points are not a good investment, since they will want to move to a different home in the near future.
You have to look upon points that you pay as an investment in your loan. Let’s say you’re thinking about paying 1.5 points to get a reduction in your home loan rate from 6.00% to 5.50%. You are paying some of your interest in advance, effectively.
Using any one of the mortgage point calculators on the internet, or by consulting with a mortgage consultant, you can see how much you will save in monthly payments on your mortgage, based on the number of years you will hold the loan.
For our hypothetical $100,000 loan, you would have to pay $1,500 in points to receive the interest rate decrease to 5.5% edmonton mortgage rates. Then it is a question of finding the breakeven point, by looking at the mortgage payment differences between these two rates. The cost of a $100,000 15 year loan at 5.5% is $599.55 a month. The cost of a $100,000, 30 year loan at 6% is $567.79 a month.
This is a clear savings of $31.76 per month, but don’t forget you had to pay $1,500 to receive this savings. All you have to do is divide $1,500 by $31.76 and you will realize that it will take 47.23 months for the payment to be fully amortized. In other words, if you don’t think you’ll be in the home for about 4 years, you gain nothing by paying the points.
Once you have amortized that initial $1,500 investment, however, you then have a clear savings of $31.76 per month edmonton mortgage rate. If you, unlike most homeowners today, remain in your home for the complete thirty years, you would have saved $31.76 over those years, which is a total savings of $9,933.58.
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