A Huge Number of Homeowners Have Mortgage Rates Too Good to Give Up

GiddyGap@lemm.ee to News@lemmy.world – 353 points –
A Huge Number of Homeowners Have Mortgage Rates Too Good to Give Up
nytimes.com
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I’m one of them. For a lot of reasons my partner and I want to move, but we have a 3% mortgage. Even though we have a large amount of equity, we still can’t afford to buy now. I’m looking a getting a loan from my parents, which is ridiculous considering our situation but almost 8% interest rates mean our payment would just about double from what we have now.

I know. It's pretty nuts. We're in the same situation. We want to move, but it makes no financial sense to sell our house with such a cheap mortgage. So we're thinking about just renting it out for a few years and move into a rental where we want to live until it makes sense to sell. Keep building equity in the meantime. But it may never really make a 100 percent sense to sell.

8%, wow. I remember when it slowly (over years) came down from 17.5% in 1990 in Australia. My credit card at the time had 55 days internet free but the internet was 18.5%, at one point I think it hit 22%.

Credit card rates are similar to that even now in the US but for a while we were at about 2% for mortgages. Mine is 2.75%. Selling this house at some point is going to hurt.