Dear Mr. Melson: My husband and I are great fans of your Searchlight Crusade essays. Excellent work! In today's mortgage-mess market, will lenders reject loan applications from average buyers (not investors) wanting to purchase acreage with a teardown outside the...
what is a underwriter final "sign off" on the conditions First off, it needs to be mentioned that a good loan officer gathers information and puts a full package, with all of the information an underwriter should need, before...
The scope of the problems that exist in the United States consumer mortgage market are huge. Enormously, mind-bogglingly, "How Big Is Space?" type huge. Yet, the problems are almost entirely on a retail level, when one provider works with one...
"what happens to your equity when the bank forecloses" was a question I got. The answer is that most, if not all, will be dissipated by the foreclosure. Let's say you own a home currently valued at $500,000, that you...
Hello, Mr. Melson, I am one of your legion of fans of your www.searchlightcrusade.net website, having lucked into stumbling upon it by hyperlinking from another site. It is my goal to read EVERY ONE of your archived articles before I...
If you haven't heard about the thirty year fixed rate mortgage, welcome to planet Earth and I hope we can be friends. The thirty year fixed rate loan seems to be the holy grail of all mortgages. It's what everyone...
There are a fair number of specific helpful suggestions to make in helping you purchase a home. All of them revolve around the loan. Let's face it, the loan is far and away the most hypothetical and uncertain part about...
Purchase Money: This is a loan that enables you, in combination with your down payment, to actually purchase the property. If you spend cash to buy the property and get a loan the next day, that is not a purchase...
The buyer's deposit is always at risk. This is just a fact of real estate transactions. I could pretend it's not so, but that wouldn't keep the deposit from being at risk - it would just make me a...
Many people think that mortgage interest works like rent: paid in advance before you live in the property for the month. This is not the case. Mortgage interest is paid in arrears. As you begin the month, interest begins...
You've probably heard the horror stories, and I've mentioned the possibility more than once. Some unsuspecting person is looking at properties beyond their price range, and it therefore has all kinds of attractive features that properties which are in their...
When I wrote explaining why borrowers should consider a 5/1 ARM, because the tradeoff between rate and cost is lower for that loan, and most people don't keep their loans 5 years anyway, so having a likely need to...
Yet that is exactly what you want them to do. To avoid competing on price, they have all kinds of distractions they offer to make life more convenient, but not cheaper. They offer automatic payment options, the convenience of having...
We got behind on house pymts & it was sent to an attorney for foreclosure.? The attorney has printed a notice in our paper on Oct 9 that it will go up for public action on Nov.16th. We found out...
Right now, due to the problems we had with unsustainable loans, nobody wants to consider anything but a thirty year fixed rate loan. I understand why, especially as I've been preaching the dangers of things like short term adjustable...
When it comes to mortgage loans, people get distracted by the darnedest things. Let's look at Wal-Mart. You think they got to be the largest retailer in the world by making less money than their competition? I assure you...
Every once in a while, the subject of assumable loans comes up. An assumable loan is one where the owner of a property has the ability to pass the loan along with the property in a sale. In other...
One of the most useless and overworked items in the real estate industry today is the pre-qualification for a loan. Sellers want buyers to be "pre-qualified", and buyers are seeking "pre-qualification" to convince buyers they are serious. The level of...
I don't know how many people have told me the story of the Purchase Offer That Was Accepted But Couldn't Be Done. They come to me because they lost their deposit or are about to and they want some way...
I get people asking me about how much their mortgage loan providers make, usually with an idea towards negotiating it down but often with the idea of choosing one loan or the other based upon the loan officer's compensation. This...
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