For US military veterans and their spouses, the benefits of being able to use a VA loan program to purchase, refinance, and even streamline refinance their homes are well known. After all, VA financing makes up over 10% of the mortgage market. Since the creation of the VA loan guarantee program, VA loans have paved… Continue Reading
If the last time you shopped for a mortgage was over a decade ago, then you might be surprised by how much the menu of loan offerings has changed. Immediately following the housing crash, mortgage meltdown, and economic recession of the late 2000s, loan programs began to disappear and an overhaul of industry guidelines and… Continue Reading
It wasn’t that long ago that the LA Times wrote a scathing article about the widespread effect that student loan debt is having on the housing market. One report they cited estimated that 414,000 home sales, or eight percent of the average number of annual home sales, would disappear because of this excess debt. The… Continue Reading
When most people think of VA mortgages, they assume they’re for the benefit of the families of actively serving members of the various branches of the military. Although military families are certainly eligible for VA mortgages, I wanted to put together a piece about all the other folks who can also get these loans. They’re… Continue Reading
Since I read this article by Maggie McGrath over at Forbes in early January, I’ve been turning it over and over. If you didn’t see it when it exploded onto social media, the gist is that most of America doesn’t have $1,000 in liquid cash at any given time. By the majority, I mean, 56… Continue Reading
There are few dirtier words to the average home buyer than “mortgage insurance.” Article after article has been written on ways to avoid mortgage insurance and on why it’s an awful, terrible thing, but I’m here to tell you something new. Mortgage insurance isn’t always a horrifying scar on your mortgage paperwork. In fact, mortgage… Continue Reading
If you’re in the housing market for the first time, the mounting cost of everything can get pretty overwhelming, even if you’ve been saving carefully. After all, everybody knows to save five to 10 percent of our dream home’s cost for a down payment, but fewer people know that we need to be saving another… Continue Reading
Let me tell you all a little story about mortgages. Long, long ago interest rates were extremely high, reaching nearly 19 percent in the early 1980s. At the same time, there were also assumable mortgages: a loan product that allowed a buyer to take over the loan on a home with the terms remaining intact.… Continue Reading
It’s inevitable that as spring approaches an increasing hoard of buyers will be flocking to the real estate market. The biggest question everybody’s got in the front of their mind, way ahead of whether or not they’ll find the right house or can get into the best school districts, is how much they should spend… Continue Reading
We’ve written a lot about getting your first mortgage: what to expect, how to go about it and all the fees and different costs along the way, but there’s a significant portion of the market that we’ve been passing over made up of future boomerang buyers. Those of you who have lost your homes due… Continue Reading