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Is the housing market getting a little bubbly all over again? Sure seems like it – at least in certain areas, anyway. When buyers start acting like they’re buying to avoid missing the boat, it’s a good bet a new housing bubble is in.
It’s also a good bet that people are paying far too much for their investment property deals in bubbly markets. And when it turns out that the cash flow is too thin to cover expenses, it could result in a whole new wave of foreclosures in the coming years.
Big changes are afoot for FHA mortgage insurance starting June 3, 2013. To help strengthen an insurance fund that continues to hemorrhage cash, FHA is once again changing up its mortgage insurance requirements – and not for the better, unfortunately. Continue reading
Mortgage rates have spiked aggressively over the past week and half, underlining the importance of not procrastinating if you’ve been given a good mortgage quote. Those that don’t act right away often end up losing out altogether on a great opportunity to lock in a great rate. Continue reading
If you’re shopping around for mortgage offers, it’s important to read the fine print when lenders advertise rate offers. Often when you read the tiny disclaimers at the bottom of an ad, you discover that a particular loan offer isn’t really as good as it looked at first glance. Let me give you case in point. Continue reading
The talk has largely been about the Federal Reserve slowing down it’s asset purchases and raising rates later this year, but it sounds like members of the Federal Open Market Committee are beginning to rethink that strategy thanks to persistently high unemployment and an apparent slowdown in the economy. If so, record low mortgage rates might be here for a while (could they even go lower?), but unfortunately, we’ll all pay the price with the purchasing power of our dollars at some point in the future.
When you’re in the process of getting a new mortgage, it’s super important to avoid mistakes that could adversely impact the terms of a loan offer or kill the loan altogether. I’ve recently had a few clients that put their loans in jeopardy because they didn’t take care to maintain one of the most important parts of their financial profile: their credit. Continue reading
The popular refinance program aimed at underwater homeowners was set to expire at the end of 2013, but the Federal Housing Finance Agency has now directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to continue the program until 2015. This is great news for homeowners who owe more than their home is worth but have not yet taken advantage of the program. Continue reading
The BBC is reporting that depositors with more than $100,000 euros in Cyprus banks could lose up to 60% of their account balances in the “bail in” deal negotiated with the EU to save the island nation’s banking system.
It looks like the gauntlet has been thrown down for Cyprus: either accept the bailout and its terms or the European Central Bank will withdraw support from the Mediterranean island nation’s two largest banks and trigger a collapse of the Cypriot banking system and economy.
EU officials last weekend announced a bailout proposal that would force Cypriot depositors to take up to a 9.9% haircut on their bank deposits to rescue the island’s insolvent banking system. The proposal created a firestorm and was flatly rejected by the Cypriot parliament earlier this week.
With EU officials and Cypriots now at an impasse over the bailout, the island nation has moved much closer to a collapse of its banking system and an exit from the euro. Continue reading
This whole Cyprus bank levy proposal has got to be among the craziest of many crazy developments in the ongoing European debt saga.
In case you missed it, European officials this weekend proposed up to 9.9% savings levy on Cypriot depositors as part of a bank bailout package for the tiny Mediterranean island nation. In other words, to bailout heavily indebted banks, depositors in Cyprus would be forced to bank over up to 9.9% of the balance of their accounts to the government. Continue reading
