There is a very specific conversation I keep hearing from homeowners around Oak Park, River Forest and the near-west suburbs.
It usually goes something like this:
"We'd move, but we have a 3% mortgage."
And I get it.
If you bought or refinanced when mortgage rates were hovering around historic lows, that loan can feel like a financial unicorn you would be absolutely bananas to give up.
So people stay.
They stay in the house with more stairs than they want.
They stay with the giant yard they no longer enjoy maintaining.
They stay because the kids are gone and half the house is mostly storing things.
They stay even though they would rather live closer to their adult children, closer to the city, somewhere warmer, somewhere smaller, somewhere more walkable, or simply somewhere that fits the life they are living now.
And sometimes, staying is absolutely the right answer.
But I think we need to separate two very different statements:
"I have an incredible mortgage rate."
and
"Therefore, moving does not make financial sense."
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
This is where people understandably get stuck.
You look at the rate on your current mortgage. Then you look at today's mortgage rates.
Oof.
Conversation over.
Except that is not actually enough information to compare the two situations.
Your interest rate matters. Of course it does.
But so do:
The better comparison is not:
3% mortgage vs. today's mortgage rate.
It is:
What does staying actually cost me, and what would the next version of my housing actually cost me?
Those numbers can tell a very different story.
This is particularly important for longtime Chicagoland homeowners.
Imagine someone bought a home years ago for $400,000.
Today, perhaps that home is worth $650,000, and the remaining mortgage balance is only $200,000.
That homeowner is not necessarily financing the next purchase the same way she financed the first one.
She may be bringing hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity with her.
If the next home costs $500,000 or $550,000, the new mortgage could be substantially smaller than simply looking at today's purchase price would suggest.
That does not automatically make moving cheaper.
But it does mean we should probably do the math before declaring the homeowner permanently trapped by her mortgage rate.
Hello, Cook County.
This is one of the reasons generic online "should I move?" calculators can be particularly unhelpful around here.
A homeowner moving from a large Oak Park or River Forest house into a smaller home or condo is not simply swapping one mortgage for another.
She may also be changing her property-tax bill, insurance costs, utilities and annual maintenance considerably.
Likewise, moving into a condo could introduce an HOA assessment that needs to be included in the comparison.
The mortgage payment is important.
The total cost of owning the home is more important.
This is the sneaky one.
Older Chicagoland homes are gorgeous. I sell them. I love them.
They also have roofs.
And boilers.
And tuckpointing.
And sewer lines.
And enormous trees.
And old windows.
And porches that periodically decide they would like several thousand dollars worth of attention.
If you are living in a large 100-year-old house because you do not want to surrender your low mortgage rate, but you are spending significant money every year maintaining a house you no longer particularly need, that belongs in the calculation too.
So does your time.
A spreadsheet cannot put a dollar value on spending Saturday mowing the lawn, shoveling snow or maintaining rooms nobody uses.
But you are allowed to value those things.
This is another possibility homeowners often ask me about.
Could I keep this house and rent it out?
Maybe.
A low-rate mortgage can make a property much more interesting as a potential rental.
But this is where I would caution against the very seductive:
Rent minus mortgage = profit!
Unfortunately, houses have other ideas.
You need to account for property taxes, insurance, vacancy, repairs, maintenance, major future expenses and possibly professional management.
You also have to consider how much equity would remain tied up in the house and whether you would rather use that equity toward your next home.
Sometimes keeping the house is an excellent strategy.
Sometimes selling it and deploying the equity elsewhere makes much more sense.
And sometimes becoming a landlord sounds great until we discuss what becoming a landlord actually entails.
The point is to evaluate it, not assume.
Also completely valid.
This is something I wish more real estate conversations acknowledged.
A Realtor's job should not be to convince every homeowner who calls us to sell a house.
Sometimes the analysis ends with:
You know what? Stay.
Maybe $75,000 spent reworking the first floor, adding a better primary suite, improving accessibility or finally building the kitchen you actually want gives you another ten happy years in the house.
Great.
But here again, I would compare the options rather than treating renovation as automatically cheaper.
What will the project really cost?
How long will you stay afterward?
Does the renovation solve the thing making you want to leave?
And how much of that investment is reasonable given the value of the house and neighborhood?
Those are much more useful questions.
This is the piece I think gets lost when we reduce housing decisions to interest rates.
Your house is an asset.
It is also where you live your life.
Maybe moving means fewer stairs.
Maybe it means walking to restaurants instead of driving everywhere.
Maybe it means being ten minutes from your grandkids instead of 45.
Maybe it is a condo in Chicago where you can lock the door and travel for six weeks without wondering whether the basement is flooding.
Maybe it is simply a smaller house that does not require an entire weekend to clean.
Those benefits do not appear on a mortgage statement.
They still count.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
And that is precisely the point.
I would not give up an exceptionally low mortgage rate casually. It is a valuable financial asset.
But I also would not let the rate make an enormous life decision for me without running the rest of the numbers.
If you are staying because you genuinely love your house, it still works beautifully for your life, and the financial picture makes sense?
Stay.
If you are staying because you have assumed moving is impossible without ever actually comparing the scenarios?
That is worth another look.
I have been having versions of this conversation with homeowners around Oak Park, River Forest and the near-west suburbs often enough that I finally decided we needed a better tool.
Not another "What's my home worth?" form.
Not a mortgage calculator that assumes you have already decided to buy something.
Something for the person sitting in a perfectly good house with a spectacular mortgage rate thinking:
"I might want to move. I just do not know if I can justify it."
So I built the 3% Mortgage Escape Plan: Should I Stay or Should I Go?
You can plug in your current home's estimated value, mortgage balance and actual monthly ownership costs, then model a potential next home using whatever assumptions make sense for you.
It lets you compare scenarios including:
And importantly, you do not have to give me your email address to use it.
Run the numbers. Change them. Make your imaginary next house cheaper. Make it more expensive. See what happens if you put more equity down. Look at the difference in taxes and maintenance.
Basically, poke at the problem until you understand it better.
Try the free 3% Mortgage Escape Plan calculator
It is a planning tool, not an appraisal, mortgage quote or financial recommendation. But it can answer the question I think homeowners should be asking before they decide they are stuck:
What would actually have to happen for moving to make sense?
This is where my part comes in.
A calculator can work with whatever numbers you feed it. It does not know that your particular block commands a premium, that your kitchen is beautifully updated, that buyers are going to hate the layout, or that the house down the street that appears comparable really is not.
It also cannot tell you whether putting $40,000 into your current house might solve the problem more intelligently than selling it.
That is the conversation I actually like having.
We can figure out what your current home could realistically sell for, approximately what you would walk away with, what your next-home options look like and whether this whole idea makes any sense.
And if the answer is:
"Laurie, this is nuts. We are keeping our 3% mortgage."
Excellent.
Now you know.
If you want to understand how I approach the larger selling process, including preparation, pricing, timing and figuring out what comes next, you can also explore my Chicagoland home selling resources.
But if you are currently somewhere between "I think we are ready for something different" and "BUT OUR MORTGAGE RATE..."
Start with the calculator.
Your 3% mortgage may be a very good reason to stay. It just should not be the only reason.
Laurie Christofano is a REALTOR® with RE/MAX In The Village, serving Oak Park, River Forest, Chicago and the near-west suburbs. She has been helping Chicagoland homeowners buy, sell and figure out what comes next since 2007.
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