A 15-year can be a great move, and the flexibility you'd give up is a real concern, so weigh both honestly. A cautionary case that stuck with us: a listener refinanced during COVID into a 3% 30-year, then a broker talked him into a 15-year at under 2%. On paper it looked brilliant. Then he lost his job, ran up around $60,000 in credit-card debt, and the higher 15-year payment squeezed him exactly when he needed room to breathe. On the 3% 30-year, the lower required payment would have given him far more flexibility to ride out the rough stretch. The risk with a 15-year is that it removes your safety valve. The payment is mandatory every month, good month or bad. A 30-year lets you pay extra toward principal when times are good and fall back to the lower required payment when they aren't, which gets you a similar payoff with an escape hatch built in. Before refinancing into a 15-year, make sure the interest savings genuinely justify it, and make sure you're carrying more reserves than a typical borrower, because the payment jump from a 30 to a 15 is significant, especially when the spread between the two terms is wide. If you want the discipline without the rigidity, a 30-year with extra principal payments is often the smarter version of the same goal. The call is yours; just make it with both sets of numbers in front of you.