If you already know you are refinancing, skip the recast and fold the cash into the new loan instead. A recast takes time and usually carries a servicer fee in the low hundreds of dollars for the modification paperwork. Paying for a step you are about to undo with a refinance is money spent on nothing. The cleaner move is a cash-in refinance: bring the lump sum to the new closing rather than applying it to the old loan first. Say you owe $300,000 and have $100,000 to put toward principal. Instead of recasting down to the lower balance and then refinancing, you refinance straight into a $200,000 balance and take your new rate and term in one shot. One process, one set of fees, one closing. A note on the premise: nobody can promise where rates go, so we would not time any of this around an expected improvement. Decide based on whether the terms available to you today actually beat what you have. When they do, the single-step cash-in refinance is faster, simpler, and cheaper than recasting and refinancing separately.