[aj7]

When refinancing houses, I always performed detailed analyses. With a good model, you can compare every deal offered. The key input is your expected life of the loan. You'd pay very high fees for an interest rate reduction if you really thought you'd keep a loan 30 years. But that is not very realistic.

I found, remarkably to me at the time, that at a single particular loan life, the APRs of a single lender all converged very accurately to a single interest rate. This told me two things: 1. Choosing a realistic loan life was key. 2. Many of the choices (points + fees vs. interest rate), were for most people illusory offerings to give the illusion of choice.