In an investment some debt or leverage can be good but, at some point, it can become all-consuming and impossible to repay! Think about what happened to homeowners who had a variable-rate mortgage, also known as debt or leverage, when mortgage rates began to rise and the value of the asset fell. If their income stayed […]
Courtesy of CoreLogic, this article contains most everything you wanted to know about U.S. residential property foreclosures! The report was created by, and is posted with, the permission of CoreLogic, a data and analytics company. The January 2016 National Foreclosure Report shows the foreclosure inventory declined by 21.7 percent and completed foreclosures declined by 16.2 percent compared with January […]
What’s better for a lender than underwriting a commercial mortgage loan, packaging it with other loans and then selling it to investors? Any inherent risk of loan default, after the time it may take to sell the security off course, would be passed off to the investor that buys it. What we saw during the financial […]
For anyone who is in the market to buy a home or soon will be, finding the right property is typically only half of the battle! The other half, unless one is paying cash, is applying for a mortgage and then fighting the battle to ultimately be approved. In the pre-financial crisis world qualifying for a […]
Often investors need to look for non-verbal clues concerning the actual direction the economy is heading in! But, for those who watch or read business news sources, you will typically find that every selloff is presented as a buying opportunity that will be coupled with the phrase ‘if you liked ____ stock at $___, you should […]
The desire to buy a home is all well and good but, unless it’s an all-cash transaction, financial decision-making is critically important! Post-financial crisis the underwriting methodology and criteria for residential mortgage loans swung in the exact opposite direction from where they had been in the go-go years of real estate. Before the financial crisis and in […]
Summary: With an eight-year easy money policy from the Federal Reserve (ZIRP) and real estate prices in some regions above pre-financial crisis highs, subprime mortgages are making a comeback! Subprime mortgage loans yes, but apparently not in the pre-2008 financial crisis form of ‘Liar Loans’! Liar Loans: ‘A category of mortgages known as low-documentation or no-documentation […]
Whether it’s stocks, bonds, real estate or politics, who do you take your decision-making cues from! Is your decision-making based on what everyone around you is doing or worse, from what the so-called ‘experts’ are telling you to do? This type of strategy can often be a mistake because the truth is that both individuals […]
Summary: State pension funds have a serious underfunding issue! It’s ZIRP but it’s more! The potential time bomb of underfunded state pension funds lurks quietly in the background, unseen and unknown by most! But like most issues that are ignored and that grow in size anyway, they don’t go away but become known only when they reach […]
Summary: At the racetrack the ‘smart money’ will typically show itself just before post-time which allows the astute punter an opportunity to get onboard with the bet. Even then there are of course no guarantees. In real estate, very often the average investor won’t know what the smart money is doing until after-the-fact when it is already too […]
