When I bought a house for the first time 15 years ago, the best mortgage rate I could get on my $130,000 fixer-upper (with a $10,000 down payment) was 6.8% fixed. That didn’t sound so bad at the time – mostly because that was the lowest rate available. I soon realized that if I used the full 30 years to pay it off, with compounding interest, I would have ended up paying over $302,500! That is well over double the amount of the original price of my house. Fortunately I was able to refinance over … [Read more...]