You did not refinance for free or anywhere near it....
When lenders offer you low or no closing costs loans, they are not offering you the same rate as someone who is willing to pay a full set of closing costs.
You pay for it in the rate...
But that is a different matter, really. In my prior case, I was refinancing with the same mortgage company. They did not do an appraisal, they did not do a credit check, and they didn’t have a loan officer involved. It really cost them nothing.
They sent me a 3-page form to fill out, I filled it out and notarized it, and mailed it back.
Now, it could be that I didn’t get the absolutely lowest rate I could. I wasn’t worried about it, because it cost me nothing, so I was saving a lot of money on my interest payments and I could always refinance again if I found a lower rate.
My point was that I did the exact same thing after Obama. I went to my existing mortgage company, and asked them to simply refinance my existing mortgage for the same amount. BUT, because of the new regulations designed to “protect” me, the lender needed to do a new appraisal, a new credit check, and a new title search. They had over a dozen forms that had to be filled out and filed with the federal government. They had a dedicated loan officer who had to come to my house and do a formal closing. All of that cost a lot of money, wasted money.
After all, they already had my loan. They knew my history, they knew the value of my house, they already had the risk. They didn’t need ANY of those checks, although those checks certainly did give them a slightly better idea of my current circumstances. But as a business, they weren’t interested in that new information. They needed it only because of government regulation.
Because of that, in retrospect I figured out that I could have gotten a cheaper deal by switching companies, since others have a more streamlined process and can charge less. There was absolutely ZERO advantage to me working with my existing lender, because they had to treat me as a new customer anyway.
Worse, even though my loan was for less than half of the assumed appraised value of my house, they couldn’t even to a drive-by appraisal, they had to send the appraiser into the house.
I still came out ahead, but just barely; the only reason I still went through with it was to get money out of the house for a college loan (because Obama took that over as well, so my home mortgage was a LOT cheaper interest than a college loan would have been, AND it was deductable because I was still below the original loan amount).