Mortgage Loans: The Tradeoff between Rate and Cost

The question every good loan officer hates the most is “What is your lowest rate?” First off, everybody doesn’t get the same choices. As I’ve said before, somebody who can prove they make enough money, has a history of paying their debt, and offers the lender a situation where there’s 30 percent equity (or more) …

Hurricane Katrina Insurance Issues

A few points as to what’s likely to happen with this. Hurricane is not a named peril on most policies. Fire, Lightning, and removal (i.e. moving stuff to a safer area after a partial destruction) are three named perils that are universally covered under National Association of Insurance Commissioner (NAIC) rules. You can get more …

Disability Insurance

I have a confession to make: When I was doing financial planning, I didn’t put enough emphasis on Disability Income Insurance. I was hardly alone in this; Disability Insurance is one of the two most undersold financial products there is. The other is Long Term Care Insurance, which product I at least researched properly and …

Production Metrics versus Consumer Metrics

When I originally wrote this, every day I was passing by another real estate office where the agent had a big banner outside “I SOLD 101 HOMES IN 2004!” This is what is called a production metric, and this one sounds fairly impressive at first glance, right? The question I want to ask is how …

How to Use The Consumer Information Here

Yesterday, I checked my referral logs and found an article where somebody was essentially saying “If you want to be depressed, go read this site and then go rent somewhere for the rest of your life”. I can understand where the sentiment is coming from, particularly if they were of the sort of person who …

Exclusive versus Non-Exclusive Buyer’s Agent Agreement

From an email: I was in the process of buying and selling the house when we saw a FSBO house we liked was for sale. But sale fell through, which is a good thing anyway because of contigency on our house. But I also suspected it failed ecause the seller refuses to pay commission to …

Able Danger, Databases, and the Right to Privacy

While I was reading up on the Able Danger controversy this morning, I ran across some side information on a recurring theme of mine. I want to bring this to the attention of my readers: From the CNN interview of Colenel Shaffer What I did was I married the land information warfare activity, LIMA, at …

Saving Money by Being Realistic About Your Mortgage

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 wants, and what they’re calling about when they call me to talk about refinancing a …