AS and I have taken walks the past few days past recently sold homes to try and determine why the sale prices were what they were and see how the homes compared to ours (at least from the outside).
Based on what we saw, we feel pretty comfortable that our home is worth at least $490K. But not quite confident we'd reach $503K, so I don't think we'll try for a refinance right now. I'll keep an eye on home sales and our debt amount and hopefully will feel more sure of our equity in a few months or a year.
But, all my work getting insurance quotes paid off to some extent. I got the results of our escrow analysis, and our payment is actually going down $41.63, not $24 like I thought! It's because the escrow shortage payment went down as well as the regular insurance escrow. Every little bit helps, so I'm happy! And since I already worked up our 2017 budget as well as having the rest of 2016 worked out, there's a nice ripple effect on our finances.
EDIT: Oh! And I just saw some new messages in our UK mortgage account. Turns out the interest rate on all of those is decreasing from 1.49% to 1.24%. Our total payments are going down about $8. Again, I'll take any little bit! 
Bit of good news on the mortgage payment(s)
August 16th, 2016 at 03:07 pm
August 17th, 2016 at 01:01 am 1471395718
August 17th, 2016 at 08:02 am 1471420951
August 17th, 2016 at 11:22 am 1471432964