Welcome to this week's Illinois Mortgage Rates and News week in review, my take on the week's financial news and how it affected Illinois mortgage rates. This has been a brutal week in the mortgage bond market. Mortgage rates spiked to their highest point of the year this week before turning arou
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02/23/2008
Last week The Fed unexpectedly dropped the discount rate by a full 3/4s of a point. Since then my phone has been ringing off the hook. The Fed is expected to cut rates again today, so my phone should keep ringing. This happens every time the Fed announces a rate cut. Most people assume that a cha
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01/30/2008
Conventional wisdom says that this is an awful time to buy a new home. The housing market is in a funk. Mortgage companies have tightened their guidelines and homes are sitting on the market for months without selling. If you listen to the news it's all doom and gloom with talk of recession and i
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01/20/2008
Mortgage interest rates are ticking down and refinancing is suddenly hot again. Make that Scorching Hot! A few years back when mortgage rates first dropped into the 5s, mortgage refinancing was the hot topic anywhere people gathered. It might not seem like the most scintillating party conversatio
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01/16/2008
2007 is almost over. Good riddance. It's been a turbulent, crazy, chaotic year in the real estate and mortgage industry. This was the year when it all hit the fan. The real estate market slowed down and home prices stagnated or fell. The sub prime mortgage sector imploded and hundreds of wholesal
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12/30/2007
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke announced today that the Federal Reserve Bank will take steps to protect consumers from predatory loans by closing the barn door now that all the cows are already out. This does leave the possibility that if the cows do return they will be stuck outside and not able to g
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12/18/2007
It's no surprise that some Major League Baseball players used performance enhancing drugs. Anyone who saw the way that Barry Bonds looked when he first came into the league, and then saw the cartoon character he became later, knows he was juicing. The same thing goes for Sammy Sosa and a host of
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12/13/2007
The big news this week was of the president's plan to bailout some borrowers in sub prime mortgages due to reset at higher rates. I've read a lot of posts and comments on this topic around Active Rain. The consensus view here seems to be that the plan is a step into socialism and will make matter
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12/09/2007
There is a new change in the mortgage market that will affect anyone who is looking for financing, whether for a purchase or a refinance. It is called Risk Based Financing, the idea that those borrowers with the best credit scores will be able to get the best mortgages rates, and those with lower
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12/01/2007
In the first installment of this series, How to Understand and Improve Your Credit Score - Part 1, I gave an overview of how credit is looked at when applying for a mortgage. The second installment covered the factors that make up your Fico scores, one of the biggest issues in qualifying for a lo
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11/29/2007
