Mortgages, Finance and Economics - Quality Loans from Dan Hartman

In a break from their old habits, major cellphone carriers Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile all announced new plans Thursday aimed squarely at people who use their phones a lot.  Anybody on this site use their phone more than 2000 minutes?  2500?  5000?  Under the new plan, Verizon and AT&T are offeri...

I would like to share with you today a little bit of what we've been working on at Province over the last 4 weeks.  We received approval from HUD to begin offering FHA mortgages in the middle of January, however, rather than beginning immediately to pursue applications for those loans, we investe...

Good morning! This Presidents' Day is a wet and windy one here in Rhode Island.  Today, in addition to a brief interest-rate market recap and preview, I thought I'd bring you a history of significant events in United States housing history, and the Presidents who effected those changes.  In 1862,...

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson joined Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke in congress today, and said that they don't expect the US economy to experience a recession in 2008, rather they see slowing growth, with a total increase of 1.8% over the 2007 Gross Domestic Product increase.  The market w...

Last week held out my expectation that the market is looking to move long-term interest rates higher, as rates increased close to 0.25% from Monday to Friday.  There was a substantial disappointment with service industry growth Tuesday, which led markets to open with lower rates, but as the day w...

That's right, the economic stimulus package will be in effect shortly, and with it will come the ability for Government Sponsored Entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), to increase their loan purchase limits significantly in higher cost areas.  S...

Good morning!  After a very busy couple of weeks, expect this week to be much quieter.  Like Punxatawney Phil (who saw his shadow, and is back to sleep for another 6 weeks), the market looks to be substantially quieter this week than it was last week.  Here's a quick rundown of economic news expe...

I wanted to share something with you today.  It's a program that you might have heard of before.  I hadn't made it a priority recently, as many of the lenders I recall offering it had suspended it, but one of our biggest lenders has recently reinitiated the Buyers' Bonus mortgage program.  This p...

Good evening!  I hope your week was as interesting as mine was.  After taking all of last week off for vacation, there's nothing like coming back to the flu to get off to a good start.  The market certainly made it worth hanging in and watching.  Earlier this week, I told you there was a whole ca...

The week of January 21, 2008 was one of the more exciting weeks I have seen on the market in quite some time, and that comes with being just a 4 business day week.  Of course, most of us around here worked Monday, also; I didn't.  I'd planned vacation for the entire week for more than a month.  B...