Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: It's Tuesday.
[00:00:00] Speaker B: That means it's Take Control Tuesday. On the phone with me is Mansa, Moussa and Manta. Today we're going to talk about the interest rate. We had a drop in the interest rate recently and more is expected, I do believe.
But you have four things we can do with the interest rates while they're dropping.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: Right. These are the opportunities that you can take. Now, once again, we are in a declining interest rate environment.
That's double edged sword. It's good news if you have debt. It's bad news if you have savings.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Right.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: So let's talk about four things that you can do. Number one, if you have a mortgage or you're ready to buy a house, lower interest rates provides a couple of opportunities. Number one, if you already have a mortgage and interest rates are going down, it might be a time for you to look at refinancing your mortgage.
If you have a $200,000 mortgage and interest rates drop by just three quarters of a percent, you can save over $100 a month. Wow. That's on your mortgage.
So take a look at that. Depending on where the interest rates are and what interest rates you can get for home buyers, if interest rates drop by 1%, you get about a 10% bigger mortgage for the same monthly payment. What that also means is it's easier to qualify.
So those opportunities exist for people that are considering home ownership or already own a home. If you need a car loan, now's the time to shop for your car loans. It's a very competitive environment out there. Now you want to try to get a short term car loan as possible.
Car loans go up to seven years now. Yeah, you really don't want anything that long. But once again, the shorter the term, the lower the interest rate, the more affordable it'll be over the long term. When interest rates drop, normally your credit card interest rate will go down.
So this provides an opportunity for you to make the same payment that you've been making, but to pay off your balance quicker.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:02:24] Speaker A: So if you carry a balance, take a look at your interest rate, make sure you're getting the benefits of lower interest rates.
And the final one is it's a good time to look at your saving strategy, you know, especially when it comes to your emergency fund or other savings that you have that you keep in CDs, money market accounts and those kind of things. When interest rates drop, your return on those drop as well. So once again, it's a time for you to take a look at those things and see if you should be doing something different.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: So once again, lower interest rates, take a look at credit card debt, your savings, whether you should refinance your mortgage or maybe you qualify now for a mortgage. And once again, the big purchases, cars, things like that, if you're going to finance those, you should be able to get better terms. And remember, when interest rates drop, it, it gets more competitive. So make sure you shop around.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: Absolutely. All sound advice, especially during this time. We could use a little bit of a break. And we'll get all that information up on our website at takecontroltuesday. Com. Manta, as always, thank you so much.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: Thank you.
