We've only had minor disagreements about money in the past, and were usually able to resolve them pretty quickly. My H is the spender, and I'm quite thrifty.
Okay, I'm cheap.
I guess that's one reason why things have always worked with him providing the income while I handle the outgo. He trusts me to take care of it because he knows I'll pinch a penny until it screams.
So, that brings us to today's conflict. H wants to refinance our mortgage. He actually contacted a broker before he mentioned anything to me, and when I said, "I would appreciate it if you would discuss these things with me before involving a third party," he explained it off as we HAD discussed it, last year, when we had our house on the market. We put an offer on a new house, and ours wasn't selling, so we discussed refinancing into an interest-only loan to keep our payments lower while we waited for it to sell. That whole thing blew up, and we're still in our old house (with our old mortgage), where we do plan on staying for the foreseeable future. So while we did discuss a refinance, it was for an entirely different purpose.
Well, at least this refinance he's talking about now is NOT an interest-only. But it does come with closing costs. $4k in closing costs. And the new payment would only be $100/mo less than what we're paying now. So, I look at it this way: it will be over three years before we realize any ACTUAL savings by refinancing. To me, it's not worth it.
He said he's only trying to lower our bills, which is good. But I said we have many other ways of cutting our bills by $100 a month that don't involve going further into debt. We just used our tax refund to eliminate $250/mo, and I've gotten more strict on my grocery shopping to reduce that expense by about $300/mo, and if we wanted to get really technical into it, we could use our tax refund in future years to fund escrow and reduce our mortgage by $250/mo. And I don't get wanting to reduce that payment at all. I've always paid extra principal. We're reducing our 30-yr loan by 7 years just by the extra principal payments I make. I could cut that out, too. There's your $100.
But now he's mad at me. When he specifically got mad at me was just a few minutes ago, on the phone. See, we discussed this whole thing last night. I told him I was unenthusiastic about refinancing, since we already have a manageable payment and a competitive rate, and I couldn't feel good about paying $4k for the privilege of doing something I don't want to do in the first place. That was last night. So he called today, and said, "I'm emailing broker guy, and I wanted to make sure that I have it right. You said you'd agree to X rate without closing costs, but if we have to pay costs, then the rate has to be below x%, right?"
I asked him, "Where did you come up with that?" He swears I said it. I swear I did not. I asked him if he remembered me saying that about paying for the privilege, he said he did, I asked him some more questions about things I'd said, he remembered them all, so then I asked him where in that conversation had I agreed to any form of refinancing?
He said, "I don't know! It came from somewhere!" grrr.
I'm not mad at him. I don't get him, but I'm not angry or upset. I just want a way to resolve this that doesn't involve signing up for more debt. He says his goal is to lower our monthly output; I've suggested several ways to do that, listed the ways I've already done just that, and asked for other suggestions from him on different ways we can save. But he seems to be digging in the heels on this refinance, and I'm afraid it is because I poo-poo on a lot of his ideas. I have a hard time telling the difference between being smart and being stubborn. If he had a good argument FOR this, I could probably get behind him. But we could throw four grand at our current mortgage company right now and reduce our payment by more than $100/mo. As for future savings on interest? Seven years of payments for us is over $70k--that's a lot of interest saved, amiright?
How to resolve a conflict when one of us is seeing forest, and the other is seeing trees? I'd usually break out the chainsaw, but I'd like to see us BOTH feel good about the outcome here.
