Advice: You can negotiate just about everything related to real estate. Try it with your lender.
We had a 5/1 ARM on our place in LA and only had a prepayment penalty if we refinanced, though our lender was willing to forgive the penalty if we refinanced through them. However, we sold, or at least we are now in escrow 😉
We used an ARM so that we could live comfortably on one middle-class salary while my husband was in school, plus we knew we would be moving in less than 5 years. We bought because the PITI (mortgage, taxes, etc) was about 1/2 the cost of renting a similar home — a post-war 3br in an area with very good schools and colleges, so we felt confident about being able to sell or rent it out. However, we bought in the old days (2003) when you could hunt down a place for under $250K, so it made sense. Lucky for us, we moved to that part of LA before the boom did.
