What if you think your mortgage payment is too high, but you don’t think you can reduce it enough to justify the fees you’d be charged for refinancing? Are you stuck?

Well, if you can’t cut your monthly payment enough to pay off the refinancing costs in a reasonable time, you probably shouldn’t care — your mortgage rate must be pretty low already.

But don’t overlook another chance to cut your monthly payment, with little or no up-front cost.

This is the fee you may be paying for private mortgage insurance, or PMI. Even if you haven’t had your mortgage for very long, you may be able to get rid of the PMI payment, since soaring housing prices may have freed you of this onerous requirement.

PMI is an insurance policy that protects the lender if you stop making mortgage payments. Basically, it is designed to protect the lender from loss if, after foreclosing and selling the property, the proceeds don’t cover your debt and the lender’s foreclosure expenses.

Lenders require PMI when the borrower makes a down payment of less than 20 percent of the property’s value. If you make a down payment of 20 percent or more, you’re not charged PMI because the property would probably fetch enough in a foreclosure sale to leave the lender whole.

Until three years ago, if you were required to pay PMI when you got a mortgage, then you had to keep making the payments for as long as you had the mortgage.

If you had a typical PMI payment of $50 to $80 a month, that would come to $18,000 to $28,800 over 30 years. The real cost could easily be four times as much if you assume that money could be invested at a decent return.

But the federal Homeowners Protection Act of 1998 changed that, spelling out conditions when the homeowner can have PMI canceled.

On loans issued after July 19, 1999, PMI is supposed to be canceled automatically when the homeowner’s equity reaches 22 percent of the property’s value. (Rules for older loans vary; your lender must disclose which rules apply to you.) Put another way, you should be free of this obligation once your loan-to-equity value reaches 78 percent: That means the amount you still owe equals less than 78 percent of the property’s current value. Figure that by dividing debt by current value — not the value when you bought the house.

Of course, the lender won’t automatically know when this point is reached. The lender, for example, might not assume you reach this point until you’ve made enough payments to reduce the debt to 78 percent of what the property was worth when you got the loan.

In fact, you might reach that point much sooner if the property has gone up in value, so it’s worth taking some initiative.

Imagine you had bought a $100,000 home with a 10 percent down payment, or $10,000. Your $90,000 mortgage left you with a 90 percent LTV ratio ($90,000 / $100,000), so you were required to pay PMI. Based on those figures you’d have to get the remaining debt down to $78,000 to be free of the PMI requirement. It would take about 9 1/2 years for regular mortgage payments to reduce the debt to that level.

But what if the value of the property went up by, say, 5 percent a year?

After 3 years it would be worth about $115,800, with compounding. Meanwhile, your regular mortgage payments would have reduced the debt to about $87,000. The debt comes to just 75 percent of the home’s current value, and you should be allowed to cancel the PMI.

In addition to the provision for automatic PMI cancellation, the law gives homeowners the right to request cancellation after their LTV ratio reaches 80 percent. To do that, you must follow the procedure set up by your lender. In addition to reaching the required LTV ratio, you probably will be required to have had a good payment history and the property will have to be free of liens.

(Unfortunately, certain types of mortgages are exempt from the PMI-cancellation rules, including some financed through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Veterans Administration, as well as some mortgages insured by the lenders themselves rather than outside insurers.)

To get started, ask your lender how much you still owe on the mortgage. In fact, this should be disclosed on the annual statement you should receive in January.

The lender will also tell you what you need to establish your property’s current value. You may be required to furnish an appraisal, which could cost several hundred dollars.

But you may be able to get by with a written opinion on the property’s value provided by a real estate broker, or an analysis based on sales of comparable homes in the area. A friendly broker may provide these services at little or no cost, in hopes of landing your business when you decide to sell.

Before spending any money, do a little research to see if it’s likely that rising property values have enabled you to satisfy the LTV requirement. Poll the neighbors on recent sales prices or ask local real estate agents.

Or spend $30 for a report on recent neighborhood sales from first American Real Estate Solutions, the Anaheim Hills, Calif., firm that supplies sales data to real estate agents: 1-800-345-7334.

Keep in mind that there’s no reason to have PMI if it’s not required. This is insurance that protects the lender, not you. So don’t pay for it if you don’t have to.