The new consumer article for today is Student Loans and Real Estate Loans: Default, Repayment vs. Nonpayment and Consolidation. These are the three issues that are most common for loan applicants to run afould of....
The new consumer article for today is It Is Illegal Under RESPA to Require Even Prequalification With a Particular Lender, debunks the legality of a practice that listing agents are trying to bring back or institute with the increase in...
Today's new consumer article is Will I Qualify for the Loan to Buy Real Estate During The Market Meltdown?, which helps people answer the question of whether they will qualify for and be able to get a loan during the...
Today's new consumer article is When Loan Modification Will Not Help, or Is Not Appropriate, in which I write about the major situations where trying for a mortgage loan modification will not help you....
Today's new consumer article is Personal Loans For A Real Estate Down Payment, which discusses an uncommon but doable alternative for rapidly acquiring a down payment. It has significant downsides even if done correctly, and if you do it wrong...
Today's new consumer article is Rent to Own and Lease With Option to Buy, which talks about one alternative to the traditional sale that usually gets a seller a higher price, while not requiring a buyer to come up with...
do you agree that a non recourse loan on a single family home is loaned with out financial risk to the borrower... if they do not want to keep their home when the market drops below what they owe,...
Loans are declined, or actually, the next thing to it, all the time. It is pretty rare for a loan to be outright rejected; I do not recall ever having had a loan outright rejected. That's a sign of a...
This is something that often happens with highly appreciated properties where the owner can no longer keep up the payments, they get hit with a notice of default, and along comes Joe or Jane seemingly riding to the rescue on...
That's one of the questions I've been asked, and it deserves an answer. Know that there is some flexibility to the answer, as there are embedded trade offs. You don't need as much of an income, or as high of...
People sometimes ask how they can improve their credit if they have old collections on their credit record. The answer is NOT to simply pay them. Paying off a five year old collection can cause your credit score to drop...
Hi--I just found your site today. The best I've ever seen/read, etc. Thank You!! I do have a question I didn't see addressed regarding our current situation/dillemma: Our present home, which we've lived in for 8 years, is worth...
I've gotten several emails to articles recently having to do with straw buyers, and more search hits. Red flags preceded home-fraud lawsuit and Fraud case hits home seem to cover one of these weasels particularly well. A "straw buyer" is...
>broker incurred 19 inquires in 1 week dropping my score. B.S. I'd go the full Penn and Teller on this one if I wasn't trying to stay family friendly. The law is clear on this one, and practice is fully...
Ken Harney has some welcome news on Move afoot to end uninvited mortgage pitches To a certain extent, these are a good thing for consumers. However, it gets way overdone. What happens is this. Let's say I get a client...
Veterans Administration, or VA loans, are government guaranteed loans available to veterans and active duty members of the armed services, that enable them to purchase homes for not money down. In fact, VA loans go up to 103 percent of...
"I am married but want to refinance my house only in my name. What do I have to do?" This is actually pretty easy, and there are at least two ways to potentially accomplish this, depending upon lender policy...
People are understandably hazy on the difference between pre-qualification and pre-approval. Pre-qualification is a non-rigorous process whereby somebody says that based upon the information as presented to them, it appears you'll qualify for the loan. Pre-approval should be more rigorous....
Every so often I get questions about loan cosigners. The main borrowers do not qualify on their own, so they get someone - most often mom and dad - to cosign. Now this is a different thing, or so I...
I got an email raising a lot of issues. Some I'm going to deal with very quickly, others I'm going to spend some effort on, but nothing as in depth as a full article would have. I'm going to keep...
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