“Banks Give Better Deals Than Brokers”

Better deals for the bank, that is. Ken Harney has a recent article Study Shows Loan Brokers’ Better Side But now a new, independent academic study has concluded the opposite: According to a team of researchers headed by Georgetown University’s Gregory Elliehausen, home mortgage applicants with less-than-perfect credit pay lower financing costs when they obtain …

Media a Privileged Class? I Don’t Think So!

Volokh Conspiracy has an excellent article on the state of the law vis-a-vis publicizing past felony convictions. I ask, how can it be permitted for the media to do something that private citizens cannot? Does the media have more freedom of speech than a private citizen? I would submit that the first amendment was clearly …

Loan Qualification Standards – “Loanbusters”

This is definitely not a “Who you gonna call?” I’ve done a couple articles in the recent past on the two ratios, debt to income and loan to value. Nonetheless, there exist a plethora of reasons why someone can be turned down for a loan even though they make it on the ratios. The first …

Naming Beneficiaries – Do It, and Keep Them Current

what happen when 401K leave blank on beneficiary Nothing unless you die, and it’s not covered in your will or other documents. Then the state’s intestate code takes effect. Each state has a law for how the estates of those who die intestate will be divvied up. These laws were typically made generations ago, and …

Mortgages and RAMs in Later Life

“Should People in their sixties take out a mortgage?” The short answer is “Not if you don’t have to.” Now if I suddenly vanish, the explanation will be that the loan industry put a contract out on me. Success in loans, and sales in general, is often attributable to selling people stuff they don’t need. …

What Drives Loan Rates?

Supply and Demand. Now that I’ve given the short answer, it’s time to explain the macro factors behind interest rate variations. But I’m going to keep referring to those first three words. It is a tradeoff between the supply of money and demand for it. The most obvious thing influencing loan rates is inflation. This …

Title Insurance, or Preventing Fifty Ways to Lose Your Money

Yes, I’ve always kind of liked Paul Simon. But this post was inspired by something I ran across from FATCO. And just to make certain you know, it’s fifty ways to lose your money if you don’t have title insurance. You don’t want problems from prior ownerships to interfere with your rights to your property. …

The Manifesto in Defiance of Islamism

Stop the ACLU has an open letter (and open trackback) on opposition to Islamism. Among many other online sites, they print the following manifesto: Together facing the new totalitarianism After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious …