Dear Bank of America,

Every other week, you send us a letter telling us about a great opportunity to re-fi our 30-year mortgage into a 15-year mortgage (for the low, low price of only 4 grand).

At first glance, it does look like an amazing deal. Knock off 10 years of payments for just $100 a month extra? Five years ago, we would’ve jumped at that rate.

Not so much anymore. Here’s why: We don’t want to be paying off our house 15 years from now.

In fact, we plan to own our home in 10 by overpaying each month (for the low, low upfront fee of zero dollars. Savings: $4,000.)

We had planned to keep remodeling, upgrading, doing the suburban weekend DIY project thing indefinitely, making our home our little castle. But then Countrywide (where you got us from) did something really stupid: They axed our home equity loan for no reason.

We had our bathroom stripped to the beams and they wouldn’t loan us 5 grand to finish, despite that we had about 30% equity already in the house (with no added extra housing boom mystery money, I might add). Either a computer or an absolute genius employee noticed that we bought our house in 2004 and lived in Mesa, Arizona, and that was enough to shut our credit line down.

We were really upset at first — it’s hard to pay for a major home project check-by-check. But we finished. And then we decided to stop trusting you, and that extends to your spiffy re-fi offers.

Get as shmoopy-emotional as you want to get in your Hallmark-card commercials, we now view our house the way you view it — as a mere financial asset. The faster you pay off debt, the faster you win. We intend to pay it off as quickly as possible. All your re-fi does is raise the floor each month so you can repossess the house more easily if we fall behind.

We’re no longer buying into suburban consumerist house slavery. This is going to cost you.  But that’s the price of broken trust.

Thank Countrywide.