Is This Supposed to be Helpful Legislation? (A bad example from Illinois)

A reader named Terri at Educating the Wheelers sent me an email giving me a heads up on the antics of the state of Illinois. here is the link. Here is the original article at blackprof. The link to the original source is broken, but here is the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, …

Forty and Fifty Year Mortgages

Recently, the forty year mortgage has started to make a comeback, and a few lenders have started introducing the fifty year mortgage. The reason, straight from the horse’s mouth, the lender’s representatives, is lowered payments. In an uncertain and unstable market, investors are getting nervous about 100% interest only financing, and so the lenders are …

100% Financing: Buying A Home With Zero Down Payment

Is there any program that i can qualify for a home with no down payment? Lots of them. We may not be talking number of grains of sand on the beach or drops of water in the ocean, but there are more ways to get get into a property with no down payment than most …

Multiple Mortgage Inquiries Do Not Drop Your Credit Score

>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 compliant with the law. I’ve seen thousands of credit reports, sometimes with dozens of recent …

Straw Buyer Fraud

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 someone whose credit is used to purchase a property and secure financing. Sometimes they cooperate …

Looking For Loans In All The Wrong Places

No, I’m not turning into a country western singer (nor is this a joke despite the publication date). Just got a search for “no closing costs no points loan cheapest rates loan”. The visit (to this article) lasted less than a full second. The obvious implication was that it wasn’t what that person was looking …

Should Negative Amortization Loans Be Banned?

Having written several articles on Negative Amortization Loans, telling of the details of what is wrong with them, and even destroying the myth of Option ARM cash flow, I sometimes get asked if I would like to see them banned completely. Well, given the pandemically misleading marketing that surrounds these loans, and pandemically poor disclosure …

Making Certain You Shop Your Mortgage – Whether You Want To Or Not

Ken Harney had 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 sat I get a client into my office, they apply for a mortgage, and I run their credit. The three …

Impound Accounts Facts and FAQs

I’ve seen a fair number of questions on impound accounts in the last several months. An impound account, also known by the confusing term escrow account because the lender is holding it in escrow, is money that you give the lender in order to pay the property taxes and homeowner’s insurance on the property when …