And you know what that means: It’s time for my annual Real Estate & Mortgage Predictions! After researching my mortgage knowledge base for 2019, the following is my take:
–Interest Rates are not moving a whole lot – Between the trade wards, fears of an impending recession, and continued low inflation, we have a formula for rates staying steady.
-ARM’s will garner more market share – With fixed rates up around a percentage point higher, home ...
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Explore These Options to Finance.
Whether you are looking to freshen up or expand your existing home or a new home you are considering purchasing, the question always comes up about how to pay for this. The answer to this question depends somewhat on how much you are talking about financing and how long you believe it will take you to repay. Let’s take them one at a time. If you are trying to renovate the home you ...
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If you are thinking about purchasing a home in the next year, the sooner you start looking, the better. Why start so soon? There are a lot of moving parts to buying a home. Getting a plan in place is the key to success.
Let’s look at all the moving parts:
– Make the decision to purchase and set an ideal time to close on a home. For example, when does your lease expire?
– Look into a mortgage pre-approval. ...
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Oddly enough, long-term interest rates started the year just slightly higher than they were one year ago. We had a few periods during the course of last year where rates were slightly above 5% for a 30 year fixed. With the recent volatility in the stock market and analysts starting to predict a recession in the next couple of years, interest rates have come down significantly since October, when they last peaked.
We now stand in the mid ...
Rent Before You Buy – It is always a good idea to get a year or so under your belt as a tenant so you can understand some of the challenges that come with homeownership. Put yourself in the shoes of your landlord. Lenders like to see a track record of making housing payments prior to application and to get you used to making a house payment prior to owning.
Check Your Credit Report & Scores – ...
• Get a copy of your credit report through www.MyFico.com. This will give us your true mortgage scores without a hard inquiry on your credit. You can also get a free copy of your report through someone like www.freecreditreport.com but it won’t give you the scores we use. There are 48 different FICO scoring models but only one that mortgage lenders use. No surprise, that this model is more conservative than most.
• Through an educational process, we can assist with ...
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When you apply for a mortgage on a condominium there are a whole host of additional considerations the lender must analyze. I like to think of it as two separate approval processes, the approval of your own personal loan and a secondary approval for the condominium complex itself. They take place at the exact same time but go down to separate paths. Since the approval process for the loan itself is no different than that of ...
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In this market, it is challenging to make a move if you must utilize the equity from the sale of your existing home for the down payment on a new home. Most Sellers will not accept an offer that is contingent on the successful closing of your existing property. But there is simple solution. Assuming you can qualify for both mortgage payments, and you have a 3 – 5% down payment for a conventional loan, you ...
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If you have had credit challenges in the past, beware of unscrupulous companies that promise they can solve all your problems. Far too many take advantage of you. They typically will charge you an upfront setup fee and then a monthly charge for as long as you remain a client. Most of them just take the “shotgun” approach and dispute every negative item on your report, every month. The credit reporting agency is then required to ...
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