u/Gastr1c

Here's an story to encourage everyone to spend time shopping for their mortgage.

My rate started at 6.375 with no points from my Realtor's broker. I then literally spent a full day from 9AM to 10PM shopping mortgages with big banks, small banks, online banks, local credit unions, and some mortgage brokers. I eventually found Tomo online and one local bank Fifth Third Bank offering 6% with no points which was very promising. The Realtor broker then matched those. So at this point I had earned a nice rate reduction with minimal effort. Everyone else was in between, including some requiring points to get close to 6%. Most lender fees were $1200-$1600. One local credit union had an archaic 1% origination fee which was just laughable.

Then towards the end of my efforts I happened to find a local broker Patriot Financial https://www.patfinancial.com/ (I don't recall where, but I think via LendingTree) and they had a serious outlier deal at 6% with $5700 in lender credits. Rates dropped the less credits you took. Nobody else had even been offering lender CREDITS, only par or points. Honestly, it was too good to believe but after some research I was surprised to learn they're literally in my town (a weird journey to find a broker that happened to be in town), have plenty of Google reviews and other online reviews. I thought they were NC only, but apparently they're licensed in 14 states. If I had stopped there I'd still have come out far ahead of where I started.

I then sent that broker's worksheet to a few of the other lenders to see if they would beat it. Most simply said they couldn't. Tomo matched the rate, had no lender fees, but made a serious attempt to try to match the lender credits but it wasn't good enough. I eventually got Chase of all places to match the rate and nearly match the lender credits, plus for my particular situation they offer a variety of additional cash bonuses for opening new accounts, and other relationship bonuses that further reduced my mortgage interest rate. For me all of those bonuses, thousands in lender credits, plus a further reduction in my rate was too good to pass up. The crazy thing is the only reason I even called Chase at all was because they hold my current mortgage and I was hoping that would somehow earn me brownie points (it was irrelevant). Otherwise I probably wouldn't have bothered to contact them.

The hours I invested earned me thousands in lender credits and bonuses, and hundreds of dollars a month off my mortgage.

Just sharing my adventure as motivation for people to seriously shop around. It can earn you a serious payday.

This has to be a fairly common issue since these don't appear to have any kind of industry standard (very annoying). What are common solutions when the existing stone countertop cutout is slightly larger than the required cutout for a replacement cooktop?

Existing proud mounted Whirlpool Gold radiant cooktop cutout from its spec sheet:

• 29.5" x 20.5" (749mm x 520mm)

Examples of new cooktop cutout requirements:

• Bosch Benchmark 30" (they give a range): 28 3/4 - 28 7/8" x 19 7/8 - 20" (731-734mm x 505-508mm
• Wolf C130460T/S: 29" x 19.5" (736.6mm x 495.3mm)
• Meile KM 7735 FL: 28 5/8" x 20.5" (724mm x 518mm) proud mounted, flush mount are 773mm x 542mm with an internal lip 749mm x 518mm