3 Important Tips to Help Select the Perfect Home Refinance Lender

Selecting the perfect home refinance lender to refinance your home is an extremely important part of the refinance process especially with all the headlines about unscrupulous lenders being splashed across the nightly news. Knowing about all the different refinancing options and how they work are an important part of the refinance process but if you are unable to find a trustworthy and helpful lender willing to offer the terms and rates you’re looking for then none of that matters. Selecting a lender can be a stressful and difficult process but here are 3 Tips that may help make the process run a little smoother.1 – Ask for Advice from Family Members and FriendsTalking to people you know and trust can be your most valuable resource in selecting a lender to refinance your home. By talking to family and friends, you can get fist hand information on the refinance process, costs involved and most importantly how they were treated by their lender. This process can be either positive or negative but that is exactly why you’re doing it. Scratch the lenders with negative feedback off your list and make notes next to the lenders with positive remarks for further research. Try and build a short list of 2 to 3 lenders in preparation for your next step.2 – Comparison ShopComparison shopping is the only way to find out which of the lenders left on your list is offering the best interest rates and loan terms. I highly recommend you download a Good Faith Estimate (GFE) form from the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) website. It’s free and very detailed. Using this form, has personally saved me thousands of dollars in fees and interest rates over the years. After gathering all your information and filling in the GFE form, it will be much easier to select your refinance lender.3 – Consider More than Interest RatesFinally, while loan terms and interest rates are important aspects of selecting a lender, none of these are more important than being treated fairly by the lender. For this reason, you should carefully consider how all of the lenders you were working with treated you through the comparison shopping process. For example, were the lenders helpful and responsive to your questions when you were gathering information for your GFE form? Did you have to make numerous calls to gather all your rate and term information or was everything done with one phone call? Were your calls returned in a timely fashion or did the lender answer questions truthfully and accurately? The best lender may not offer the best terms or interest rates. If you had to struggle to gather information from a lender offering the lowest rates and terms, you might want to seriously consider not using them. Most legitimate lenders are going to be helpful and provide you with information in a timely manner.Additionally, you should trust your instincts regarding your potential lenders. With the recent crackdown by the government and increased federal regulations being imposed on lenders, most of the bad ones have been weeded out and gone. But, there will always be a few bad lenders floating around the market. If you run across a lender that simply doesn’t know what they are talking about and you don’t trust or feel comfortable with them, move on.