Celebrating ten years in our home

My husband and I recently celebrated our tenth anniversary in our house. I was surprised a few months ago when papers arrived in the mail notifying us that it was time to renew our mortgage because it certainly didn’t seem like five years had gone by since the last time we’d renewed our mortgage.

Ten years in our home – our first house, has gone by quickly! Midnight – our Lab, just loves the house, the backyard, the grass (rolling in it), and the neighborhood. Just look at those eyes!

Lucky for us, we’re quite happy with our bank and didn’t feel the need to go searching for a new bank to carry our mortgage. When we bought our house in 2001 interest rates were very low so we were advised by our mortgage broker at our bank that a mortgage at a variable rate would probably be very good for us. It certainly was! I can’t tell you how happy we were at the time, seeing as we were quite nervous new home owners who didn’t know if they were going to manage to pay all the bills or not! I think for the first 6 months of our mortgage we our rate was at half a percent below prime and prime at that time was 1% so we were only paying 0.05% interest!

Thanks to the banks initial advice, and I suppose the way the economy has been over the last decade, we’ve been able to stay on a variable mortgage at a very low interest rate. We’ve saved a lot of money because of their recommendations.

This time when we were renewing our mortgage all we had to do was make a phone call to the bank. Don’t you love that? I mean, they had sent us the paperwork so we could see all of the various terms and we could decide between taking a 2, 5, or 10 year mortgage at varying rates. We simply called up our contact at the bank and asked a few questions and within a few minutes he’d set our minds at ease, lowered the rate on the mortgage term that we were interested in, and all we had to do was sign the paperwork and fax it back to him. Easy!

We’re all set for another five years and if by chance the interest rates start to sky rocket upwards we can always lock in. We made sure of that! Oh and the next time we have to renew our mortgage we’ll only have two years or less left to go on it and then we’ll own our house! Of course, between now and the next seven years we might want to move and start all over again in a new house. I guess we’ll wait and see what happens.

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2. “The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and are not indicative of the opinions or positions of SunTrust”