Sponsored Content: It’s true that hindsight is 20/20, and that applies to investing, buying, and refinancing on a house. With worries over inflation and increasing interest rates, people may be more closely looking after their assets, including the homes they live in.

As a result of this turn inward, homeowners reconsidering their living situations are at an interesting crossroads: Do you try to refinance your mortgage to take advantage of potential benefits, do you look for ways to downsize, or do you wait for the housing market to restabilize?

What We Don’t Know

While it can be said that people lean toward market leeriness in uncertain times, making investments require some degree of risk, one way or another. There’s no way to know for certain how the future will unfold when considering market trends, historical data, and rising interest rates.

What We Know

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people decided to renovate their homes to improve their stay-at-home experience and increase the value of their property. Others saw record low mortgage refinance rates from Discover^® Home Loans and other home lenders as the perfect opportunity to take the next step in their financial lives.

Those low interest rates were and are based on the Effective Federal Funds Rate, commonly known as the Fed Rate. The Fed Rate is set by the Federal Reserve to balance inflation, and as it rises and falls, so do interest rates across the board.

However, the Fed Rate can be both proactive and reactive. Once fears of inflation rise, the feds often increase rates to combat it. When interest rates go up, people become less inclined to make major purchases like homes and cars, theoretically leading to market stabilization.

Times like these typically see less refinancing, because no one wants to pay higher rates; however, that doesn’t mean you might now be stuck with less-than-favorable terms before market stabilization happens.

When you’re paying off debts, you want to get the best rates possible, and many banks or lenders will provide you with fixed-rate, long-term quotes if it means earning your business. Since home ownership spans such a long road in an individual’s life, using market conditions to snatch a long-term, fixed-rate mortgage with a low APR can set homeowners up for great value for decades to come.