Want a 2.5% mortgage? Buy it.

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.5K Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2026

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Remember those juicy mortgage rates from back in 2021? You don’t actually need a time machine to get one today. You just need to find someone willing to sell their house AND their mortgage to you. Called ‘assumable mortgages,’ they take a long time to get, and you’ll probably need a fat wad of cash.

On today’s show, how to buy your way into a cheap mortgage rate.

Related episodes:
How mortgage rates get made
How mortgage interest rates work (and why they're currently out of whack)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:02.0	This is the indicator from Planet Money.
0:13.5	I'm Whalen Wong.
0:14.8	And I'm Stephen Bissaha.
0:16.1	Steven, you are back.
0:17.7	You've returned from the business desk.
0:19.8	Yes, good to be back temporarily, but I plan on making more regular visits.
0:23.8	Sorry I've been gone so long.
0:25.3	We have missed you.
0:26.5	And I return, Waylon, with a classic question.
0:29.9	If you could travel back to any time in history, when would it be?
0:34.7	Oh, well, I need indoor plumbing.
0:38.6	That's important.
0:39.9	Maybe like the 90s.
0:41.5	90s, okay, not too too far back.
0:43.6	I'll go back to the 90s.
0:44.8	Yeah, my time travel visit would actually be even sooner, just five years back in the past to 2021.
0:51.4	Oh, you want to go back to the thick of the pandemic?
0:55.6	Why? Why? Maybe not the thick of it, but you know, the one reason I want to go back is so I could get a mortgage.
1:02.0	Mortgage rates at the time were crazy low, like less than 3%. Yes, a distant memory now. And to put that in context, we were just celebrating last week when mortgage
1:12.0	rates fell below 6%. Lucky for us, there is a way to travel back to 2021 and drag those low mortgage
1:20.3	rates into the present. Yes, you can get a 2.5% mortgage in 2026. Okay, but if science fiction has taught us anything, Stephen, it's that going back in time
	...

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