|
|
 |
|
 |
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
Where To Find The Best Rates For Your Mortgage?
As with all of my articles this will be based on a scenario in my home town. (Which may be similar to yours).
Loans and mortgages can be a tricky business, not to mention a costly business if you are unsure where to go and seek out help. The fact is that most local bankers and lenders will look over your present situation checking items such as your past payment history, your overall credit rating and most importantly your present income. Either yours or yours and your partners. This will in turn pretty much get you 2 or 3 options at best. So you shop around and you get the same offers almost eveywhere you go.
There is another way to help you find the best rate.
With technology advancing and with mortgages being such big business due to the lifespan of how long you will be paying the lender, your options are not nearly as limited as you may or may not be lead to believe. I was doing a seminar a few weeks ago with a room of about 20 people who were all looking at cost effective ways to get into a home and how to make sure they were getting the best option for their money. Now this is very important for several reasons :
1. Its your money, you want the best and most practical mortgage payment available.
2. This is a long term investment, so you do the math here. What makes more sense $700.00 a month or $900.00 a month? Yes, it is a trick question, because it depends on how long the terms are and how much you can afford. It may seem off but alot of times the $900.00 is worse, usually more is better but well read the fine print.
3. You want competition. Keep reading and I will explain.
Alright, the more competition you get the better it is for you in the long run because the lender wants your business. But...if you live in a small town, like I do, you may not have much competition at all. So if you dont like what they offer you what do you do? Do you necessarily take the best offer? Personally I wouldnt...I would do some digging, alot of people still dont realize that you can actually take 5 or 10 minutes at most and check out the internet for a whole slew of lenders and mortgage companies that will literally fight for your business. Its true and its convenient for you. You dont have to make an appointment, get dressed up, take a positive pill and get all stressed out over the meeting. You simply go online, fill out a few forms (as many as you like) and wait for the replies. Its fast, its incredibly effective, and it will more than likely save you a lot of time and money in the long run.
That being said, you should still make sure you are comfortable wih the companies you fill the forms out with and here are a few must tips to doing this :
1. Give out as much personal information as you are comfortable with, dont fill out anything you suspect to be non-required information.
2. Make sure the companis are reputable, look for a B.B.B logo on the page. (Better Business Bureau)
3. This is not a must but a recommendation, when asked for your email give them one you check periodically, I never give out my personal email to any company unless I have been doing business with them for awhile, just to avoid alot of potential email I dont want.
4. Final option, go to www.alexa.com and see what their overall rating is online, take a look at the companies stats. Have they been around awhile? etc. and if you can view their testimonial pages. If they have alot of testimonials then chances are you have found a reputable company to go with.
Well, there it is. The internet can give you alot of options and alot of companies who will fight for your business and again, in the end you win. You will get the best mortgage available and you get to choose the company. Peace of mind.
Until next time.
Take care,
Is the Inverse Mortgage a Scam? New Program Promises Mortgage Payoff inside of 5 Years
If a mortgage could be paid off in five years or less, without it costing homeowners an extra cent, why wouldn?t every homeowner in America be doing it? Because they don?t know, or because they?re too wise? Although the former may be the case for many, I certainly hope the latter is the answer for most.
A real estate finance consultant company, who shall remain nameless here, claims it has the secret to paying off your mortgage in five years or less, without you paying any more on your monthly payment or adding to the principal mortgage of your real estate loan. They call it an inverse mortgage.
Now, this company, which is not a mortgage brokerage or a bank, claims that all you have to do is pay your mortgage payment every three weeks, instead of every four. In addition to this one tiny change, you?ll need to go to work for the company, recruiting other people to do the same. Of course, they say this is not a pyramid structure, although the way you cut into your mortgage and build wealth is by banking some of each payment that comes in for everyone you recruit, after the initial three. Incidentally, this company will take one of your payments at the end of the year for hiring you to recruit more people into their program.
Hmm, not a pyramid scheme or multi-level marketing? I don?t claim to be an expert in these areas, but I certainly know the basic structure, and you probably do too. Doesn?t a program requiring you to get others to buy something with the idea of you receiving a residual benefit from each recruit sound a lot like multi-level marketing? It does to me.
I may be a skeptic, but there are a few basic problems with the inverse mortgage and with this real estate finance program.
1. This company has been around for less than one year, and after some exhaustive research, I can?t find one person who has ever actually made money or cut into their mortgage as quickly as the company says one can.
2. In the last 20 years, there hasn?t been a revolutionary idea for reducing your mortgage, without paying more or without doing something like a bi-weekly mortgage (a completely legitimate, if unnecessary, approach to mortgage reduction). Why is it that this new company ? not even mortgage people ? has suddenly come up with something that true experts with 50 or more years of experience in the industry have not?
3. This one is the most alarming reason to be skeptical. In addition to the strange notion of recruiting people to take part in this program, the sponsoring company wants you to turn over your bank account information, so it can debit your account monthly to supposedly pay your mortgage.
So, is the inverse mortgage a scam? I can?t say unequivocally that it is, because I don?t have any true evidence to say so. The many years of experience in mortgage and investment real estate that I do have, though, tell me to beware of any program that looks too good to be true. This one does.
Why a Mortgage Professional Beats a Banker Every Time -- The Story Tells It All
The best way to explain why a mortgage professional is always better than a banker is to use an anecdote. My parents lived in the house I grew up in for 35 years, so it was finally time to move. They found a home they liked, made an offer, and signed a purchase agreement. After conferring with me, they decided to go to a bank ? one of the more well-known mortgage banks in the region. Of course, I thought a good mortgage professional would be better, and I told them I could follow the deal from start to finish, if they went with a company I previously worked for, but the bank they decided on offered a little better rate and lower fees, so they wanted to go with them.
I told them to go ahead, but I was nervous, knowing what I know about large banks, ones that are not wholesale lenders, who work with mortgage professionals. After many trips to the bank (remember, bank loan officers don?t come to you) that included plenty of hassles over paperwork, they agreed on a loan for their new home. The next step was to sell their house, so they could use the proceeds for a down payment and moving expenses. My parents had over $60,000 in equity and wanted to put a good chunk down on their new house and use the rest for expenses.
Since time was against them ? they had 30 days to pay off the seller of their new home, and they didn?t have an immediate offer on their current residence ? they decided to apply for a bridge loan (more on bridge loans later). This would take the equity from their current home and use it to pay off their mortgage, leaving them enough money for the down payment on their new house. When they sold their old home, they would use that money to pay off the bridge loan. Here is where things got very dicey.
Their new lender offered 85 percent of the value of their home for the bridge loan. So, if the home appraised for $100,000, they would get $85,000. They assumed the value would be there. The bank sent an appraiser on a drive-by, which means my parents weren?t notified, and the appraiser did not go in the house. He then wrote up the value for the bank?s loan underwriter. Drive-by appraisals almost always come in lower than the home?s actual value.
Now one of the three or four loan officers my parents were dealing with called and told them the value they would use for the loan, and it turned out to be about $10,000 less than they expected. This meant they would not have the money they hoped for, and they would now have to put less money down on their new home. This would, of course, lead to other problems ? like a higher monthly mortgage payment and less money for moving expenses. They were, to say the least, devastated.
Being the proactive person that I am, I decided to intervene and call their bank. I spoke with one of the many loan officers (you see, you don?t have just one person handling you at a bank; you?re just another loan number). I had, of course, already done my own research and learned that the value of my parents? house should be much higher. I asked the loan officer to explain how they came to this very low value. She fumbled through her answer and told me they use comparable sales prices in the area and that they don?t do a drive-by appraisal.
She said I would have to talk to someone in their equity department, because she didn?t know what other options there were. I was somewhat surprised at her lack of intimate knowledge with the bank?s policies, but I certainly wasn?t shocked. This is the nature of home loan operations at a bank ? one person passes the responsibility to another and only in rare instances does one department really know what the other is doing. You?ll never have this problem with a good mortgage professional.
After being channeled through another receptionist at the same branch office, I wound up speaking to an underwriter in the equity department. She told me that a drive-by was, in fact, done. I explained to her as I had the other woman why the value was inaccurate. (I had very accurate comparable sales prices from different resources, given to me by one of the area?s best appraisers.)
I asked the equity underwriter if my parents could have a complete interior appraisal done to give a true value, and she said this was an acceptable option. In the end, my parents got the value they needed, and things worked out just fine. They needed a quality mortgage professional, though, to get it done.
 |
©Copyright
InsideTheWeb.All Rights Reserved.
|
 |
|
|
||
 |
Designed by kohj |
 |