If’ you’re a customer of Countrywide Mortgage, you’ve probably got your share of "Easy Refinance Today" offers through both regular mail, and phone calls. I finally got tired of screening the calls and decided to pick up and tell them no.

On a lark, I decided to get the ‘free, no obligation mortgage account review’ just to see what would happen.

I was transferred to one of their ‘mortgage specialist’ who took a look at my balance due, interest rate, and payments.

You Live WHERE?!??

I knew things weren’t going to go well when the strange silence came after he started looking up prices for comparable homes in the area. I know for a fact that no homes have sold in the past year anywhere near me, with many houses on the market, so I wasn’t expecting much.

"It looks like according to my records, your house would only appraise at $170k. Is that right?!??"

First, how would I know without a professional appraisal, and second, even by rule-of-thumb estimates that sounded about what I’d guessed it would appraise for.

"At that rate, even if we reduced the interest by approx. a percentage point, the actual savings wouldn’t work out, after the points."

I was pleasantly surprised to hear them being honest about my savings.

"Even if we were able to somehow get it appraised at $200k, that would just be barely enough to get rid of PMI, and give you a $480/year savings, but I don’t know if we want to risk putting a few hundred into an appraisal that will probably come back short."

At this point I was more than a little impressed. I’d heard about much of the ‘appraise-raise’ practices where the companies made loans based on (possibly inflated) home values. And now that things were in the dumper house-wise, this Countrywide person was sounding pleasantly responsible in letting me know that the outcome probably wasn’t worth the risk.

We made a bit of smalltalk and then said goodbye. He wished me luck in my refinance, and mentioned that they would continue to check back periodically to see if there was anything they could do to lower my payments/rate.

Score one for Countrywide. Even though they weren’t able to lower the payments, they treated me straightforward and professionally.