Just looked back at mortgage interest rates from January 2022, and it's interesting to see where things were at that time. Back then, the 30-year fixed mortgage interest rates were hovering around 3.56%, which people considered pretty solid. The 15-year options were sitting at 2.88%, and if you had a jumbo mortgage, you'd be looking at slightly higher rates—3.57% for the 30-year jumbo.

What caught my attention is how different the landscape was. A $100k loan on a standard 30-year would run you about $452 monthly, but over the full life of that mortgage, you'd be paying roughly $62,864 just in interest. For those considering a 15-year payoff, the monthly hit was steeper at $685 per $100k, but you'd save significantly on total interest—around $23,268.

The rates were moving pretty slowly back then. The 30-year had barely budged from the previous week's 3.51%, and that's actually when people were talking about locking in rates while they were still at historical lows. If you were thinking about refinancing, the conventional wisdom was to check your closing costs against potential monthly savings to find your break-even point.

Interesting to compare—credit scores, debt-to-income ratios, and loan terms all mattered just as much then as they do now for getting approved and scoring the best rates. The ARM option (5/1 adjustable) was around 2.80% at that time, slightly lower than the fixed options, which made sense for people comfortable with rate adjustments after five years.