Make this mistake and you'll lose thousands when refinancing your mortgage

http://redtape.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/01/16239394-make-this-mistake-and-youll-lose-thousands-when-refinancing-your-mortgage?lite

By Bob Sullivan
Jan. 1, 2013

I had just borrowed about a quarter-million dollars and my question was simple: "How do I pay you back?"

The woman on the other end of the phone, however, couldn't tell me. Ten days had passed since I signed the papers to refinance my home and, with the holidays approaching, I was worried my first payment would be late. She tried to soothe me with perhaps the most misunderstood phrase of the refinancing process: "Don't worry. You get to skip a payment."

Had I listened to her, it would have cost me thousands of dollars. And if you are one of the millions of homeowners who will refinance in 2013, it could cost you, too.

If your new year’s resolution is to save money or get control of the family budget, refinancing remains a really good option. But the idea that “skipping” the first payment can be pain free, financially speaking, is a myth, repeated over and over by loan officers like mine. Sometimes they are lying, sometimes they are misinformed and sometimes they are just trying to get an annoying borrower like me off the phone. But with rare exception, they are giving bad advice. (News flash: Whenever a bank seems to be doing you a favor, it probably has a hand in your wallet.)

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My loan officer didn't laugh, but eventually she put me on the phone with a supervisor who sounded very grave. She'd done additional research, she said, and found out that the reason customer service couldn't find my loan was because it had already been sold to another bank. We called that bank together and found out my loan actually funded on Nov. 30, so my first payment was indeed due on Jan. 1. And I would have been liable for about an $80 late fee if I had listened to my loan officer. The manager profusely apologized.

But I'm not writing to warn you about late fees. There's a much bigger culprit here you have to worry about. Had I followed my loan officer's advice and skipped a payment, even if the bank waived the late fee (which the manager said was likely), I would have paid a steep penalty anyway. You've probably guessed the punch line: there's no such thing as skipping a payment. In reality, homeowners are borrowing that money and extending the loan term for an extra month. The payment will be tacked onto the end of the loan, with interest. How much? If it's a conventional loan, that’s 30 years’ worth of interest. Effectively, you are borrowing one month's payment for 30 years. Ouch!

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Just how much extra interest can skipping that first payment cost you? There are too many variables to create a decent rule of thumb. But here's an illustration from Guttentag's site with deliberately round numbers. Skip the first payment of $500 on a $100,000 loan at 6 percent, and you will pay an additional $2,993 in interest during the 30 years.

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