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Mortgage Blog covering all aspects of home buying and owning
March 2006 - Posts
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Getting a mortgage is relatively easy. Avoiding the pitfalls can be difficult. I've come across a set of 4 rules that make pretty good sense to me. Check them out. 1. Don't respond to solicitations for a mortgage. While not every loan provider who solicits Read More...
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Comparison-shopping for mortgages confusing you? It's a world of "points," "ARMs" and a barrage of surprise fees. In recent years, it has become even tougher to compare mortgages because now we have all sorts of new offerings, like interest-only mortgages Read More...
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Ah, I love experts. Here's a quote from the latest news service that I read: "The housing market threw the world another curve on Thursday. After five straight months of declining sales of existing homes, a sixth dreary month was pretty generally expected. Read More...
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If you own a home, you likely have home insurance. It's usually a condition of your financing. In any case, you should WANT to have it, because if something happens to your home, your insurance will provide you the funding to repair or rebuild. However, Read More...
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When I think of the word "foreclosure", I think of Disney cartoons that I saw when I was a kid. Okay, I'm going to date myself squarely at my 40-something years, but when I was a kid, we'd watch "The Wonderful World of Disney" on Sunday nights. After Read More...
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Here's something that might surprise you: many Americans are confused about the terms of their adjustable-rate home mortgages and underestimate the amount by which their loan payments could jump, according to a new study by Federal Reserve Board economists. Read More...
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According to some of my favorite news sources, a lot of us are starting to get in some trouble with our debt. We're becoming delinquent on mortgage payments, which puts us in a particularly bad position. From there, we try to refinance. In some cases, Read More...
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I didn't even know you could get these -- apparently, you can actually get a 40 year mortgage! As of March 17, Freddie Mac's Weekly Mortgage Survey of market rates put the average fixed-rate for 30-year conforming loans at 6.34 percent. Forty-year loans Read More...
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Mortgages linked to Prime (linked to the Fed Fund Rate) are increasing, but 30-year fixed mortgages today are about .5% higher than they were last year this time. Interesting, yes? As a result, the ARMs are not the deal they were last year and the fixed Read More...
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I found this quite surprising. Apparently, in a number of urban North American markets (including a few in Canada), houses are out of reach for over 50% of middle-class wage earners. Prices have leaped ahead of incomes in some areas. For instance, in Read More...
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Are you looking to sell, now that spring fever is starting to hit in your area? How do you price your home well? Pricing resale property is an art form in many cases. In the pricing game, new home builders probably have the easiest time of it because Read More...
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Well, it seems that creditors must be heating up the competition for people with good credit scores. The rates have fallen again in the last month, and it's not because the Federal Reserve has dropped their rates. Why is this happening? Here's my theory: Read More...
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If anything good has come from the epidemic of identity theft we have learned how important it is to monitor our credit reports and our credit scores. Just a couple of years ago, most Americans didn't even know they had a credit score, even though credit Read More...
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I just realized it's been almost a week since I wrote my last entry. When you have a new baby in the house, time just flies. More accurately -- it evaporates! And my sleep-deprived spouse doesn't have much sympathy for the fact that I don't have time Read More...
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Now here is some particularly interesting news: With the housing market cooling, a number of people are backing out of their agreements to buy new homes. Even though buyers often put down hefty deposits, there still has been an uptick in buyers asking Read More...
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Ever fall for that trendy new color and then live to regret it? Did you buy those moss green appliances when they were in style and build them into your kitchen? What about putting down laminate flooring instead of hardwood, and now all you can see is Read More...
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Hmmm... Seems that not only are new homes on the market longer, with inventory increasing, but this is also happening with resale homes. Resales of U.S. homes fell 2.8% in January to the lowest number in two years, the National Association of Realtors Read More...
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