About RecastDesk

Last updated: October 2026

RecastDesk is a small independent site about one narrow subject: recasting a mortgage. It exists because almost everything written about recasting is published by someone trying to sell you a different loan. Search for the term and you land on a lender’s explainer that spends four paragraphs on what a recast is and then pivots to why a refinance might be better for you.

A recast is a mechanical, boring, well-defined transaction: you pay a lump sum toward principal, the servicer re-amortises the remaining balance over the remaining term, and your monthly payment drops. What makes it hard is that every servicer does it differently — different minimum principal, different fee, different paperwork, and a fair number that simply do not offer it at all. That is the gap this site fills.

What we cover

Four areas, and we stay inside them:

• Tools — calculators that tell you what your payment becomes, what the recast saves over the remaining term, how many months it takes to recover the fee, and how large a lump sum you need to hit a payment target.
• Guides — the mechanics: eligibility, minimum principal, cost, paperwork, timelines, and how the rules differ for FHA, VA, USDA, jumbo and adjustable-rate loans.
• Compare — recasting against the alternatives people actually weigh it against: refinancing, paying extra principal, a loan modification, a HELOC, a reappraisal, or a cash-out refinance.
• By Lender — one page per servicer, because the answer to “can I recast?” is almost always “it depends who services your loan”.

How the guides are made

Every page starts from a specific question that people really search for — “does a recast lower my interest rate”, “why did my payment only drop by $60”, “can I recast right after refinancing” — and answers it in the first two paragraphs. Everything after that is support for the answer.

The lender pages are built from what each servicer publishes: their recast policy, their fee schedule, their minimum principal threshold and the address or portal they accept requests through. Where a servicer does not publish a policy, we say that plainly rather than paraphrasing a forum post as if it were policy. Where a policy changed recently, we note the date we last checked it, because a 2019 answer to a 2026 question is worse than no answer.

We do not claim to have phoned every servicer in America. What we do claim is that every specific number on this site — a fee, a minimum, a turnaround time — is attributed to a source you can check yourself, and that when a number is an estimate rather than a published figure, it is labelled as one.

How the calculators work

The calculators are plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and they run entirely in your browser. There is no server involved. We never ask for your name, your address, your Social Security number, your account number or your email, and nothing you type is transmitted, stored or logged. Refresh the page and every input is gone.

That is a deliberate design choice. A mortgage calculator does not need to know who you are, and a site that collects loan details in exchange for a number has a business model that is not advertising.

Each calculator states its own assumptions on the page — typically the remaining term, whether the rate stays fixed, and whether taxes and insurance are held constant. Change an assumption and the answer changes, which is the point: these are estimates for planning, not a payoff quote. Only your servicer can tell you the exact figure they will use.

How the site is funded

RecastDesk is supported by display advertising. That is the whole business model: we write useful things, people read them, and the adverts in the margins pay for the hosting and the time.

We do not sell leads, we do not pass your details to lenders or brokers, and we do not take payment for a mention. If we ever add affiliate links, they will be labelled on the page and they will not change the order of anything — and we will not accept affiliate arrangements from mortgage lenders or lead-generation networks, because the conflict of interest there is the exact thing this site was built to avoid.

Corrections

Lender policies are moving targets. If you find a fee, a minimum or a rule on this site that no longer matches what your servicer told you, please write to hello@recastdesk.net with the page and what you were told. Corrections are the most useful mail we get, and pages that get corrected are re-dated at the top.