My wife and I bought our house just before the housing bubble burst. At the time, we thought we were getting a pretty good mortgage rate. Oh, those were the days.
Since then, we’ve been chipping away at the mortgage, suffering through PMI, and hoping against hope that we might qualify for some sort of refinancing miracle to bring our rates down. Now, we aren’t struggling to make ends meet or anything, but the more we can apply to the principle of our mortgage, the faster we can pay it off, and that is just good sense.
At a recent visit to the bank, we brought up the question of refinancing to the bank employee. Things still don’t look great for the miracle mortgage reduction, but the whole process got me thinking about the word “mortgage” itself.
When you trace it back to its Old French and Latin roots, mortgage is a compound word that is literally translated as “dead pledge”. The pledge part is understandable in reference to the modern use of the word. When we take a mortgage out from a bank, we are pledging, or promising, to pay the money back to the bank. So where does the dead part come in?
Simply stated, if you die before paying off your debt, the bank retains full ownership of the property. And if you pay off your debt to the bank, the debt is considered dead. Either way, something dies.
Just like I did a little inside when I heard what our house is currently worth according to the bank’s estimates.
Same here. Just keep chipping away. Heard the Obama programs to help those w mortgages that are “underwater” are soon expiring. Make sure to check them out before to late. Heard it can lower interest rates.
I feel your pain, Josh.
Me, too! We just got our tax estimate for the year on our rental house, and the drop in value was painful. Blech.
10 months to go til the end of PMI…
that was interesting . I am anew reader see you again