[quote=svelte][quote=scaredyclassic]So if you have no extra monies and refinance, I agree, it’s all gravy. But if you have a 500k mortgage and much more than that in monies to possibly pay it off, and you refi, you are gambling you can do better than the interest rate you’re paying, after tax.

Gambling. Yep. Not a bad bet, but gambling.[/quote]

Agreed.

I can see both sides of the coin – nobody’s going to get severely burned whether they cash-out refied at a low rate and put that into CDs, or whether they paid off their mortgage and kept expenses low. Both are reasonable courses of action.

And neither course is going to have a major impact on finances. One isn’t drastically better than the other.

But I tend to think that folks who see a big pile of money in their accounts will think they can spend more. So there is a chance that it will get frittered away and the financial advantage (if interest rates continue to rise and there becomes a financial advantage – I don’t believe the numbers work at the moment) would disappear if that happened.[/quote]

Yup! Money burnin’ a hole in my pocket and all that.