Bankingtopia Articles on ‘Home Advantages’
Mortgages Online
Monday, November 10, 2008 18:51 5 CommentsNowadays one has little or no time to meet and discuss matters in real! Businesses have shifted online and one doesn’t travel in reality to sort out matters! Virtual travel is a fad these days. But no! It isn’t just fancy. Internet is undoubtedly one of the most useful aids of the new millennium.
Same is the case with mortgage market and advices. You can find great mortgage advices online and further you can even find an agent to hunt out the best advice for you! Here again, the authenticity of online mortgage advices are in question and seen with suspicion often. A piece of suggestion would be to continue to do so, as this cautiousness will save you a big deal in the long run.
Various types of mortgages schemes (that mainly includes reverse mortgage, second mortgage, home equity mortgage, refinance mortgage loans) can easily be obtained online. So, how does one go about with this online mortgage or the online mortgage advice prior to it?
Firstly, do your search on the various online mortgage advice services. This can be done with the help of directories (both offline and online). These directories offer you a great source of information on various services, feedback obtained and so on. Exclusive websites that compare and evaluate various mortgage services can be browsed too. However, having a look out on the feedback from users (you can use forums and social networking for this!) can give you an unbiased picture of the reality.
Keep more than one choices for the advice! You just ought to fill in a form and submit it. Many of the advice offering services do provide with a free trial. Do order for one and evaluate their capabilities yourself. A word of caution here; do not fall for cons that ask for private information.
A flying thought just questioned- what’s the use of going online? Two advantages can be viewed straightaway. First one, you will save a huge bag of time and can get your work done at your comfort from any place! Secondly it provides you more exposure citing internet far surpasses physical boundaries.
Mortgage Companies Bad Loans
Monday, November 3, 2008 23:05 8 CommentsYou know what’s great about this country? Even if you smoked pot all through high school, graduated with a D average, didn’t get into college, knocked up your girlfriend at 18, and spent the last nine years selling shoes at a strip mall making $8 an hour, you can still get a $300,000 home mortgage. Well, at least you used to be able to, but that was before the economy finally gave out under the weight of thousands of defaulted home loans. It might be slightly more difficult to get that loan now. Sorry to get your hopes up.
Whose bright idea was that anyway? Seriously, which mortgage company was the first to decide that it would be a great idea to give vast sums of money to minimum-wage service monkeys with no savings, no education, and no collateral (aside from their ultra rare Pokémon card collection)? Is it really that much of a stretch to imagine that a person who can hardly afford to rent an apartment would be unable to make payments on their four bedroom, 2,500 square foot Barbie dream house? Why did nobody see this coming?
Here’s one possible reason: If you’re in your 20s, foreclosure and bankruptcy aren’t really that scary. Sure, your credit will be ruined for awhile, but after 10 years (max), those records will be stricken from your credit score and you’ll be back to maxing out your shiny new credit cards. In the meantime, you’re free from your debts and can live happily in a tiny apartment off of your weekly paycheck, playing video games and eating Doritos. Isn’t a consequence-free life grand?
It’s not all your fault though, right? Of course not. That mean old bank didn’t explain the concept of a floating mortgage to you, did they? No, you just took their word when they told you that a 2% interest rate now would be better than a 6% rate always. It’s a shame that you never did a simple Google search to see what “floating mortgage” meant. Yes, I’m sure that 2% interest rate was nice, and that with it you could just barely afford your monthly payments, but what happened after that 2% floated on up to 11%? Oops, bet you didn’t see that one coming.
Consumers only have to bear part of the blame though. For the last few years, banks and lenders have been practicing absolutely predatory lending methods, some of which boil down to nothing more than pyramid scams. Remember all of that “refinance your home” crap a few years back? Interest rates dropped, so tens of thousands of Americans abandoned their old mortgages and refinanced with slightly lower interest rates. For some, this was a smart move. For others, those shining stars who ditched their fixed-rate mortgage for a low floating mortgage, well, they should have done their research. Who could blame them though? Interest rates kept dropping, and banks kept telling them that they could always just refinance lower and lower, and that the free money would just keep pouring in.
The key thing about a home, though, is that they’re only worth what someone else is willing to pay for them. Sure, the bank may have told you that your house will have appreciated $30,000 in value by the time you’ve paid off you loan, but I’m sure that they told you that in good faith, not because they were trying to get you to sign your loan papers. Too bad you never took a basic economics class. If you had, you might have learned of a little concept called “supply and demand”. I’ll sum it up in simple terms: When the supply of homes is enormous, people will demand them at a low price. In other words, when thousands of people found themselves unable to make their mortgage payments (remember those pesky floating mortgages?) and listed their houses for sale, nobody wanted to pay the ridiculous prices being demanded. Thus, homes were seized, bankruptcy ensued, and the stock market crashed.
