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Recent Reviews
- How we pay with plastic will change Monday with new credit card rules
- Eliminating ‘He Said, She Said’ on Loan Modifications
- 10 Ways to Screw Over the Corporate Jackals Who’ve Been Screwing You
- The Unemployment Game Show: Are You *Really* Unemployed? – From Mint.com
- Credit card’s newest trick: 79.9 percent interest
- 42% of parents have paid a child’s debt
- More Homeowners Fall Behind on Mortgages
- Problem mortgages hit new high at 14 percent
- Google Tackles Mortgage Market With New Comparison Ads
- Latest bank fee is for paying off credit card on time every month
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Eliminating ‘He Said, She Said’ on Loan Modifications
WHEN it comes to home mortgage modifications, everyone seems to have a complaint.
Borrowers accuse mortgage servicers, which process the paperwork, of often losing important documents like pay stubs and bank statements. Servicers assert that the borrowers fail to submit certain papers and claim that they did, or submit the wrong ones.
Now, an industry group is rolling out an online portal that could eliminate these issues. Hope Now, a partnership of mortgage companies and nonprofit housing counselors, this month introduced “LoanPort,” which lets borrowers seeking a permanent mortgage modification upload digitized versions of their documents and track the progress of their application, with the help of a loan counselor.
“With this, there’s no ‘he said, she said’ element with lost documents,” said Faith Schwartz, the executive director of Hope Now, which is based in Washington.
But Howard Glaser, a principal of the Glaser Group, a consulting company in Washington, predicted that the initiative would be too small to have much impact on what he characterized as a broadly dysfunctional loan-modification effort.
“Marginal improvements are not going to have a significant impact on increasing loan modifications,” Mr. Glaser said.
Read more at: The New York Times
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{Photography by The Truth About}
10 Ways to Screw Over the Corporate Jackals Who’ve Been Screwing You
Tired of getting pushed around by faceless big business? Here are 10 ways to push back!
The New Year is nearly here, and so much has happened. Wait, what’s that? Nothing major at all has happened, you say? Oh right, we’ve been stuck in neutral since dumping the toxic trash of the Republican Bush administration and embracing Democratic promises of hope and change, neither of which have blossomed.
A year of our collective life has flown by and our global culture is still rife with schemers, screw jobs and sorry excuses for solutions. And we just sit back and take it, year after year. But no more. When you make that hefty list of New Year’s resolutions, drop some of these bombs. Then duck. You’ll get your change faster than you can say, “Teabag this!”
1. Mortgage underwater? Just walk away from it. Even academia says it’s OK. Move to the city and rent.
“Homeowners should be walking away in droves,” University of Arizona law school professor Brent T. White told the Los Angeles Times. “But they aren’t. And it’s not because the financial costs of foreclosure outweigh the benefits. One can have a good credit rating again — meaning above 660 — within two years after a foreclosure.”
In a scholarly paper called “Underwater and Not Walking Away: Shame, Fear and the Social Management of the Housing Crisis,” White tells cash-jacked homeowners that they can return the screw.
We’ve been championing that course for years, with reports on walkaways and trashouts, as well as violent homeowner blowback. Hell, we called the Great Recession before most did, and we’re still calling it another Great Depression in the making. So trust us. And if not us, then take it from the professor, who will soon be joined by a chorus of similarly credentialed whistleblowers as the financial crap truly hits the fan in the years to come. Go ahead, move back to the city and rent. You’ll end up there anyway when your suburb runs out of water and malls.
Read more at: AlterNet
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{Photography by Shoothead}
Problem mortgages hit new high at 14 percent
Data mean foreclosures may not peak until next year
More than 14 percent of borrowers were in trouble on their mortgage during the third quarter, a new record, according to an industry survey released Thursday, which also suggests that the foreclosure rate is likely not to peak until next year as unemployment rates continue to rise.
Unemployment remains a big driver of the problem, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, which conducts the survey. Those with delinquent loans now include a growing portion of people traditionally considered creditworthy and people whose mortgages are insured by the Federal Housing Administration.
“The outlook is that delinquency rates and foreclosure rates will continue to worsen before they improve,” said Jay Brinkmann, the group’s chief economist.
About 9.6 percent of borrowers were delinquent on their mortgage during the third quarter, according to the survey, and another 4.5 percent more were somewhere in the foreclosure process. Overall, about 14 percent of mortgage loans or 7.4 million households were delinquent or in the foreclosure process during the quarter, according to the group.
Read more at: The Washington Post
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{Photography by The Truth About . . .}
13 Things Your Home Remodeler Won’t Tell You
With business down it may be the perfect time to indulge in some home improvement projects. Read on for more secrets of home remodelers.
- Business is down 16 percent. The good news for you: I’m returning calls and trimming prices.
- High-end people will do smaller jobs we might have spurned a few years ago. Focus on projects that will keep your house market-ready, like upgrading a bathroom.
(Read more at: Reader’s Digest)
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{Photography by Willie Lunchmeat}
Nationwide offers 125% mortgage
The Nationwide Building Society has introduced a mortgage allowing borrowers to take loans worth 125% of the value of the home they are buying.
It will only be available to existing customers in negative equity who want to move house.
Negative equity means that the value of someone’s home is less than the amount they owe on their mortgage.
Nationwide said the deal was a very “niche offer” and that not everyone in negative equity would qualify.
The Financial Services Authority is considering limiting mortgage loans to 100% of a property’s value.
‘No more risk’
The Nationwide only offers new customers mortgages worth 85% of the value of the home they want to buy. (Read more at: BBC)
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{Photography by radcarper}
Undocumented income makes it hard to get a loan
With more than $300,000 in combined annual income, tens of thousands of dollars in the bank and credit scores that top 800, Jennifer France and her partner would seem like ideal candidates for a mortgage refinance.
But when they applied to swap an interest-only loan on their nearly $1 million San Carlos home for a 30-year fixed that locked in today’s low rates, they were summarily denied. The reason: effectively, because both operate their own businesses.
“I was really surprised, I had been preparing to refinance for years,” said France, a landscaper and gardener. “It’s hard for the self-employed; that puts us in a bind.”
While the amount they make is easily enough to qualify for the new loan, tax deductions for self-employed workers dropped their official income below the threshold that banks wanted to see.
A few years ago, theirs would have been the ideal scenario for a stated-income or no-documentation loan, which allowed individuals with ample but unconventional sources of income to secure home loans. But after untold numbers of borrowers lied about their financial wherewithal to buy homes they couldn’t afford, often with a wink and nod from mortgage brokers, nearly all lenders stopped offering what became known derisively as “liar loans.” Now even the well-qualified borrowers for whom the products were first intended can’t get them. (Read more at: San Francisco Chronicle)
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{Photography by Guttorm Flatabø}
Extremes: The Most Expensive Home in America
What does William Randolf Heart’s house have that makes it worth $165 million?
Got a spare $165 million? This could be the house for you. Actually, calling it a house doesn’t do it justice. It’s a 72,000-square-foot, six-building, six-and-a-half-acre Beverly Hills estate once owned by newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst — and that asking price is the highest ever for a residential property in the United States. Broker Stephen Shapiro isn’t worried about finding a buyer. “It will sell at or above that price,” he says. (Read more at: Reader’s Digest)
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{Photography by Markus}
Mortgage defaults in America: Can pay, won’t pay
It is easier to dump a home loan if a friend has done so too
HOUSE prices in America have fallen so far that as many as one in five households have mortgage debt greater than the value of their homes. In a few states, borrowers are not liable for the shortfall between an unpaid loan and the resale value of the home it is secured upon. Even where borrowers are on the hook, lenders often find it too costly to pursue unpaid debts. So some homeowners may be tempted to default and escape the burden of negative equity.
How widespread is this practice? New research* based on a survey of 1,000 homeowners suggests that one in four mortgage defaults are “strategic”—by people who could meet their payments but who choose not to. The main drivers of strategic default are the scale of negative equity, and moral and social considerations. Few would opt to renege on their mortgage if the equity gap were below 10% of their home’s value, the authors find, partly because of the costs of moving. But one in six would bail out if loans were underwater by a half.
Four-fifths think strategic default is wrong. Those in the unethical minority are four times more likely to renege on loans (allowing for other influences) when their negative equity reaches $50,000. But morality has its price. When the equity gap reaches $100,000, “immoral” homeowners are only twice as keen to walk away from their debts as “moral” ones. People under 35 or over 65 are less likely to believe that default is wrong. So are the well-educated. (Read more at: Economist.com)
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{Photography by TheTruthAboutMortgage.com}
The Home Appraisal Mess
From The Business Insider, June 25, 2009: We’ve been talking this week about the NAR’s war against what it claims are low-ball home appraisals, caused by new regulations, and outside appraisers using distressed and foreclosure sales.
Real estate appraiser Jonathan Miller is weighing in on the question, and finds some merit to the idea that there are problems with current appraisal methods.
But first, he thinks it’s ridiculous to dismiss distressed and foreclosure sales as being somehow irrelevant, since the market is the market. If a home seller has to compete with other homes that are being foreclosed upon, then them’s the breaks, and that does legitimately drag down the value of a home. (Read more at: Yahoo Tech Ticker)
Update: The NAR’s Appalling Fight Against Honest Appraisals (The Business Insider)
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{Photography by Nancy Arora}
Why Home Prices May Keep Falling
HOME prices in the United States have been falling for nearly three years, and the decline may well continue for some time.
Even the federal government has projected price decreases through 2010. As a baseline, the stress tests recently performed on big banks included a total fall in housing prices of 41 percent from 2006 through 2010. Their “more adverse” forecast projected a drop of 48 percent — suggesting that important housing ratios, like price to rent, and price to construction cost — would fall to their lowest levels in 20 years.
Such long, steady housing price declines seem to defy both common sense and the traditional laws of economics, which assume that people act rationally and that markets are efficient. Why would a sensible person watch the value of his home fall for years, only to sell for a big loss? Why not sell early in the cycle? If people acted as the efficient-market theory says they should, prices would come down right away, not gradually over years, and these cycles would be much shorter. (Read more at: NYTimes.com)
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{Photography by The Truth About}
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