No closing cost mortgages can be expensive
It costs money to take out a mortgage. Costs can range from $4000 to $5,000 for a low-priced starter home to tens of thousands of dollars for multi-million-dollar homes. The truth is that all mortgages have closing costs. The no closing-cost moniker is simply mortgage-speak for employing alternative methods of having the customer pay them.
The bottom line is that lenders, appraisers, title companies and others who are necessary components of the mortgage process are absolutely paid for their services. It’s how the funds to pay them are generated that is absent from the seemingly misleading claim. One fact is indisputable: In the end, the borrower pays the costs in one form or another.
Don’t get me wrong. Exploring how to lower the amount of cash required to achieve homeownership or refinance a loan is an effective and often-times advantageous goal of many prospective and current homeowners. From my perspective, the “no closing-cost” claim is simply a murky marketing strategy designed to inform borrowers that there are alternatives to paying cash for their closing costs.
Those alternatives typically come in three forms, the first of which is to have the lender pay the costs through the use of a “lender credit” at closing. But where does the lender find the funds to pay the costs without wiping out part or all of the profit they would normally make on the loan? The answer is by charging a higher rate to the borrower.
In industry jargon, it’s called premium pricing. Premium pricing occurs when the lender charges a slightly higher-than-market rate, which results in a higher profit to the lender when the loan is sold on the secondary mortgage market. The lender then taps the additional funds to pay the buyer’s closing costs. The trade-off results in the borrower paying a slightly higher monthly payment in exchange for eliminating some or all of the upfront closing cost expense. Here’s an example of how such a scenario might play out.
Let’s say you take out a $200,000, 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 6.75 percent that carries $4,000 in closing costs and a monthly principal and interest payment of $1,297.00. By opting to pay the slightly higher rate of 6.875 percent, the payment rises by $17.00, to $1,314.00, with the lender picking up the $4,000 in costs. At that pace you would “pay back” the $4,000 in just over 19-years. Sell or refinance prior to that time and you win because you’ve paid back less than you “borrowed”. Hold on to the loan for more than that time and you’ll lose your advantage.
Another method of avoiding paying cash for the closing costs is to add them to your loan amount. This option works best with refinances, where borrowers have sufficient equity to meet the loan program’s loan-to-value ratio. Equity is the difference between the value of the property and what’s owed against it. Financing an additional $4,000 at 6.75 percent for 30-years increases the monthly principal and interest payment by $26.00, with the breakeven point more than 12-years away.
A third and increasingly popular method of keeping the closing cost dollars in your pocket is to ask the seller of the home you’re buying to pay your closing costs. But, alas, there’s no free lunch. If the seller agrees to accept a $250,000 offer and pay $4,000 of your closing costs, he or she will net roughly the same as if the property sold for $246,000, which is theoretically what you could have purchased the property for had you paid your own costs.
The key to success is to shop like you mean it. Not all lenders offer the same options or pricing, so it truly pays to shop a number of them before deciding on which method of offsetting your closing costs works best for your particular situation.
See you at closing.
Gary Sandler is a full-time Realtor and president of Gary Sandler Inc., Realtors in Las Cruces. He loves to answer questions and can be reached at 575-642-2292 or Gary@GarySandler.com.
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This article originally appeared on Las Cruces Sun-News: No closing cost mortgages can be expensive
