It's great to have you here on the Clark Howard Show. You know, our mission is to serve you

with advice and information that empowers you to make better financial decisions in your life.

Today, should you refinance your mortgage? A question I have not posed in so many years, I cannot

even think how many years ago it was that that was a question that I was going to answer.

Also, are you with what I call a giant monster megabank?

Do you know what that is?

That's Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America.

These four banks have over 50% of the banking market in the United States, a market that has more than a thousand banks, but four of them account

for more than half a banking in the U.S. The problem is you're with one of the big four,

or you with what's known as a big regional bank or super regional? You're probably paying fees

and not getting much on your money when you don't have to.

I'm going to talk to you about how people are migrating their money in a way that's

comfortable for them. So mortgage rates were so crazy low for a number of years because the Federal Reserve was using extraordinary powers

to suppress what people could earn on savings and what people had to pay on loans to save off another

Great Depression.

Central bankers and the U.S. and the rest of the developed world were all coordinating

after the banking scandals led to the Great Recession and the housing bust here and problems

overseas to try to keep the economy from continuing to spiral down in the Great

Recession, they did all kinds of things that were out of the ordinary, and that's how people

ended up with mortgages in the twos, threes, and fours.

So once the crisis passed, and rates resume more, let's call it normalization,

and then we've had the inflation the last many years, mortgage rates, as you know,

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