Having trouble making your mortgage payments on time? Trying to work out a deal with your lender but having difficulty finding out just who that is? In a recent item for MSNBC, John Schoen, covered some of the pitfalls of finding out who owns your mortgage and what to do about it. Here is a link
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06/30/2008
FHA offers a Streamline 203k program that allows a homebuyer/owner to finance up to $35,000 of home repairs in the purchase or refinance of a home. This is an excellent program because it doesn't have the same review requirements of a complete rehab loan. I would be surprised if you could make
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06/30/2008
What are DPAs?How do they work?Who is eligible for a DPA?Why use a DPA?These are a few of the questions asked about the down payment assistance (DPA) programs that I get on a regular basis. What is a DPA? A down payment assistance program is one where a homebuyer can receive a gift amount between
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06/27/2008
DEFINATION OF RECESSION: Two or more consecutive quarters with negative growth in the economy. NEWS: The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) for the first quarter of 2008 was 1% GROWTH. This is after a .6% GROWTH in the last quarter of 2007. By these figures and the defination above, we are not in a rec
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06/27/2008
The Federal Reserve stopped lowering the discount rate at their June meeting and left the door open for raising the rate at their next meeting in August.The futures players are betting on a .25% increase at the next meeting. Kind of like Las Vegas, isn't it? However, the Fed did not use their pol
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06/27/2008
Home prices across 20 major U.S. cities have dropped a record 15.3% in the past year and are now back to where they were in the summer of 2004, according to the Case-Shiller home price index released Tuesday by Standard & Poor's. Case-Shiller is deemed one of the most reliable measures of home pr
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06/27/2008
Here is an article by the Washington Post about the effect of the new FHA loan limits on lending. Although across country from Oregon, I think the report got the gist of what the loan limit increase means in lending. Lane County's FHA loan limit is $343,750.Check this out: http://www.washingtonpo
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06/27/2008
Changes to FHA LoansBy Fred Chamberlin (Eugene's Loan Guy)FHA loans have been around for a number of years and during the past 3 or 4 they lost their appeal as lenders found them hard to work with.Unfortunately, that is one of the reasons that so many subprime loans were made to people that other
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06/27/2008
I am constantly getting calls from clients asking if their rate is going down because the Fed announced a rate cut. Well, the quick answer is no. Fed rates often have an opposite effect on Mortgage Bonds. A great explanation of how this works was done recently by Barry Habib for CNBC.Here is a li
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06/27/2008
I have a weekly newsletter about the financial markets. This week's installment talks about changes in the economic reports for the week. To access the newsletter, please use the following link?http://www.mmgweekly.com/w/index.html?SID=6151ca1f26822034f6b12f142bdfc9dbThanks and enjoy the informat
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06/27/2008
