Tag Archives: Foreclosures

Real Estate

Where to Get Honest Foreclosure Help

 

George Adamson the man Who Lived With the Lions See link at bottom of page to go Adamson's home page
George Adamson the man Who Lived With the Lions See link at bottom of page to go Adamson's home page
 Here are places to get help if you or a friend are facing foreclosure.  There are so many scams out there now that it can be difficult to find legitimate help. Be careful of paying money up front in order to get help and some of the Internet advertising that says they guarantee that they can stop your foreclosure.

Here’s a list of programs that are either operated by the U.S. government or have its seal of approval:

  • Call (888) 995-HOPE, the Homeowner’s HOPE Hotline to reach a nonprofit, HUD-approved counselor through HOPE NOW, a cooperative effort of mortgage counselors and lenders to assist homeowners.
  • The Controller of the Currency’s consumer information site for banking-related questions is www.helpwithmybank.gov

Source: Controller of the Currency (04/21/2009)

By the way, check out this site of George Adamson, The man who lived with the lions:

Real Estate

Shall I Walk Away From My Home? Part 2

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walking  

The post I wrote entitled “Shall I Walk Away from my House” drew some real good comments both pro and con.

Shall I walk away from my home? If you are backed against a wall and have no choice, then of course the answer is yes, if you have no other choice. But If you like your house, you can make the payments, then the answer is no. You should have bought your home because you liked it, it appealed to you; it made you happy to have it as your house. The consequences of walking away are that you are going to have to rent because your credit score is down the tubes. Because of your low credit rating you are going to have to rent from three to five years or more because lenders won’t lend money for you to buy a home.

Owning a home is forced savings. You have to make the payments, your principal is going down, and money is depreciating, making your payments lower in relation to your earnings over a period of time.

The primary purpose of owning a home, unless you are an investor, is to live in the house, not to make a profit off of it. I believe that some people got carried away during the housing boom times and bought a home just to make money, not live in it. So if you have a steady job, and feel secure in it, this is just as good a time to stay in your home as any other. The question that goes along with this is: should you buy a home now, if you don’t have one.

The philosophy that I’ve had all my life in regards to a home has been to buy not to rent. I remember when I worked as an engineering aide and making barely enough money to do anything, I bought my first house through a private party with a small down payment. The seller carried the paper.  From that first purchase, a few years later, I was able to trade the home in Diamond Springs for a lot in Nevada City. Since I had the lot free and clear, I was then able to get a loan to have a contractor build a new home for me. My mortgage payment was $175 a month. I was in charge of the Nevada County Engineering Department at that time, and believe me, that mortgage payment was all I could afford. Do you think money has depreciated?

Is this a good time to buy? Is this a good time to hold on to your house if you can? The answer to both of these questions is yes. It’s always a good time as far as I’m concerned. I would rather buy a home than rent. I don’t like to be under a landlord.  Besides, it always seemed a waste of money to pay off someone else’s property when you could be paying off your own.  Time has shown that money depreciates and real estate increases in value.  My first mortgage on the house I had built was $175 a month. I could barely afford it. What can you buy today for $175 a month? Not much, certainly not a home.

Some people have forgotten the value of home ownership during this downturn. All you hear about are the people who are losing their homes. We forget that most of us bought a home to live in, not to make a living buying and selling, or getting into a “get rich” scheme.

So should you stay in your home?  My answer is stay there if you can, or buy one if you can.  History, no matter what people say, shows that real estate goes up and the value of your money goes down. I wish I had that $175 a month mortgage on my present home.  Let me know what you think.

Real Estate

Foreclosures Up 30% in February

hwyfore

 Although several major lenders have temporary halted foreclosures, the number of households threatened with losing their homes rose 30 percent in February from last year’s levels. RealtyTrac reported Thursday.

Nationwide, nearly 291,000 homes received at least one foreclosure-related notice last month, up 6 percent from January, according to the Irvine, Calif-based company. While foreclosures are highly concentrated in the Western states and Florida, the problem is spreading to states like Idaho, Illinois and Oregon as the U.S. economy worsens.

“It doesn’t bode well,” for the embattled U.S. housing market, said Rick Sharga, vice president for marketing at RealtyTrac, a foreclosure listing firm. “At least for the foreseeable future, it’s going to continue to be pretty ugly.”

The rise in foreclosure filings came despite temporary halts to foreclosures by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and major banks JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America. Those companies pledged to do so in advance of President Barack Obama’s plan to stem the foreclosure crisis, which was launched last week.

It’s my opinion that the Al-A loans, are now starting to hit home. Al-A loans were the re-wrapped subprime loans that lending institutions came up with when the subprime loans were starting to get a bad name. There is an estimated $600 billion in residential mortgages that are due to fail that were made in 2006-2007 because of the Al-A loans.

 

Real Estate

Bay Area Medium Home Prices Plunge

newprice

According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle today, home prices in the Bay Area have dropped dramatically since its peak in spring 2007.

Spring 2007, median Bay Area home sale price $720,000

February 2009, median Bay area home sale price $295,000

The large drop in home prices is the result of more than half the homes sold in January and February were foreclosures, compared to two years ago when only about 2.6 percent were foreclosures. This drop in home prices has created a surge of buyers. Among those buying, first time home buyers with an incentive of an $8,000 Federal tax credit to savvy investors who are buying to rent and waiting for the appreciation of home prices which will surely come.

According to the SF Chronicle:

“A Chronicle analysis of sales data from MDA DataQuick, a San Diego real estate research firm, indicates that the majority of local buyers are either first-time homeowners or investors taking advantage of the huge glut of fire-sale-priced distressed properties – bank-owned foreclosures, short sales and homes surrounded by foreclosures and short sales.

“At least two-thirds of the market is split between investors and first-time buyers,” said LePage. “The balance is mainly the people who have to buy because of a new job or other life events.”

Many homes here have returned to the realm of reasonable prices, with the median sale price hovering below $300,000. That means that even people with incomes around the Bay Area’s median of $80,000 or so can find properties within their price range. ”

An increasingly larger share of the buyers are investors. They’ve either made the calculation that, for the first time in years, they can make money by renting out the properties, or they think they can re-sell them at a profit. “

I agree with the investors, real estate prices will come back. In 1982 when the Savings and Loans crashed, people were saying, real estate prices will never come back. I say, history repeats itself.

Real Estate

Subprime Foreclosures, Move Over for Alt-A Foreclosures!

pick1
Gone are the days when subprime loans were what kept bankers up at night, thanks to explosions in other corners of finance. But, In terms of toxicity, subprime loans had no equal. That is until now. The loans of better heeled people are now beginning to go bad at an alarming rate.Alt-A troubled loans have already brought down some banks, including IndyMac, a California bank. Mooney’s, a rating agency, has recently quadrupled its loss projections on bonds backed by Alt-A loans. It now projects losses for 2006-2007Alt-A securities to top 20%, compared to a historical average of under 1%.

 

The problem is that much of the Alt-A lending came at the tail-end of the credit boom in late 2006 and 2007. By then subprime was already getting a bad name. So Wall Street hit on a ruse. What it did was to take borrowers who in normal times would have been subprime and dressed them up as mid-prime!  Many of these loans were doomed from the start.  According to the Bank for International Settlements, a staggering 40% of these American mortgages originated in the first quarter of 2007 were interest only or negative amortization loans.

Alt-A mortgages, were offered to borrowers sandwiched between subprime and prime. These loans were supposed to be for people who had reasonable credit standing but unsteady income, such as the self-employed. The lending institutions had very low standards for these loans, using scant documentation and any way to make a loan, such as exotic negative-amortization mortgages, which allow borrowers to pay less than the accrued interest, with the difference added to the loan balance. Like I said before, the main requirements were to put a mirror in front of your face, if the mirror steamed, it meant you were breathing and you had a loan.

Analysts at Goldman Sachs put possible write downs on the $1.3 trillion of total Alt-A debt, including both securitized and un-securitized loans, at $600 billion, almost as much as expected subprime losses.

So, prepare yourself for another wave of foreclosures, this time the Alt-A mortgages, due to poor lending practices by banks and Wall Street.

 

Real Estate

Octo- Mom Gets New House and Other Revelant Real Estate News

Large building in back is Puget Automaker's Office Building in Buenos Aires (Possibe quarters for Octo-Mom?)
Large building in back is Puget Automaker's Office Building in Buenos Aires (Possibe quarters for Octo-Mom?)

 

Nadya Suleman’s the gal that just had eight more children, along with the six she already had, is going to have to move. Seems like the house she is living in is owned by her mom, which is being foreclosed on.  The news is that the family is about $20.000 behind in their mortgage payments.

So what is she to do, well, don’t worry, her father is buying her a bigger and better house. Seems like Nadya’s  father is buying her a home in La Habra, south of Los Angeles for $564,000, that’s right over half of a million dollars. The home is around 2,500 square feet and features four bedrooms, three baths and a large fenced in backyard. Well one house foreclosed, another taken off the market, have to look at the bright side of things.

Let’s see, if Nadya sleeps on the couch, and you take 14 kids and divide it by four bedrooms, that’s 3.5 kids per bedroom.  If she has two more, then it would be a better fit, 4 kids per bedroom.  (Don’t tell her that)

 Nadya gave birth to eight children in January when she already had six.

I’m not going to go into the fact that some homeowners are thinking of letting their house foreclose or just walk away because their house is worth less than their mortgage.  I hear this more and more recently. So what are you going to do if you let your house foreclose? You can’t buy another house for five years, and if history is any clue, the value of the house you left behind will be more then the mortgage you walked away from.  Well, I guess I did rant a little?

 

Real Estate, Travel

Refinancing? Be Careful

 

Tile mural in subway at station Plaza Italia, Buenos Aires (I'm still here)
Tile mural in subway at station Plaza Italia, Buenos Aires (I'm still here)

Along with scams to help you avoid foreclosure, which I talked about in the past, there are others out there trying to take money away from home owners in distress who need to refinance because they are facing foreclosure or those whom are just refinancing to get a lower interest rate on their mortgage.

Rule number one is that you never pay in advance to have someone help you get a loan. Some banks or lenders may require that you pay upfront for an appraisal, which can run between $300 to $450 at the most. However, my experience is that you are better off using your local bank, mortgage broker or credit unions before you pay for anything, which at the most would be an appraisal. Companies outside your home area are not familiar with local real estate conditions and you may spend several weeks or months until you find out they can’t make the loan.  I was surfing the net, looking for some information to bring you that might be of help if you are considering refinancing and the pitfalls that I was talking about.I happened to come across Attorney General’s website, Jerry Brown, and he has prosecuted some scam artists. These scammers were taking advantage of people trying to refinance by charging upfront fees of between $1,500 to $2,500 and doing nothing.  Here is part of his press release:“In November 2008, Attorney General Brown announced the break up of the First Gov scam ring. First Gov, — which also operated under such misleading names such as Foreclosure Prevention Services; Resolution Department; Reinstatement Department; and Reinstatement Processing — solicited hundreds of homeowners, offering to help them stop the foreclosure of their homes.Ring members promised victims they would renegotiate their mortgages and reduce monthly payments. They demanded an up-front fee, ranging from $1,500 to $5,000, to participate in the loan-modification program.

Victims were told to stop making mortgage payments and communicating with their lender because this would interfere with the loan modification process. After collecting their fee, ring members pocketed the money and did nothing to help victims.” 

The full text of his press release is at Office of Attorney General

By the way, talk to your mortgage company if you can, but so far they have been dumb and want you to stop making payments before they will talk to you!

Real Estate, Travel

Jon Stewart Blasts CNBC

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Another picture of a professional dog walker. Possible new occupation for some of the people on CNBC (I'm still in Buenos Aires and I love dogs)
Another picture of a professional dog walker. Possible new occupation for some of the people on CNBC (I’m still in Buenos Aires and I love dogs)

I love comedy. Comedy takes a complex situation and makes it so easy to understand. This was so much so with the Comedy Central’s skid by Jon Stewart taking on the high and mighty prognosticators of stock market trends on CNBC. Those advisors on CNBC are always full of advice of which stocks to buy, interviewing CEO’s of large companies and glowing about their potential outcome. Jon Stewart shows several of these interviews by them. He then shows the outcome shortly afterwards where for all of their wisdom the companies fail. I love the interview shown of Sir Allen Stanford, a billionaire at the time of the interview on CNBC. Shortly after the interview, the FBI stated that they think Sir Stanford is running a Ponzi scheme.

But the most telling part of the program was when they showed Rick Santelli ranting and raving at the Obama Administration for giving a small portion of the bailout money to homeowners facing foreclosure. Wow, what a rant. (By the way, Santelli was supposed to appear on the show, but didn’t show) But Jon Stewart puts it all in perspective when he proceeded to show that these icons of prognosticators had no problem with the present and past Administrations giving billions of bailout funds to banks, General Motors, Chrysler, AGI and other large companies.

You know it’s easy to place the blame on people facing foreclosure because they should have known what they were getting into when they took out a loan to buy a house. But who set the standards for these loans? It wasn’t the Realtors or the mortgage brokers or the homeowners. Yep, it was the banks setting the lending standards, enticing people into buying a home with low interest rates. Once people bought a home, the loan was set to trigger into a higher interest rate. Don’t you think the banks knew some people could not afford the mortgage? In the old days they called that bait and switch. Now who is getting the majority of the bailout funds, hummm, of course, the banks.

I don’t know what CNBC’s qualifications are to hire Rick Stanletlli or any of the other interviewers. Is it that they are highly educated to help people lose their money, or are they poorly trained psychics? So Rick and his cohorts are hired by CNBC to advise people of the best stocks to buy, and they are almost always 100 percent wrong, so why are they picking on people who are losing their homes? Is it because the homeowners are not as educated in financial matters as they are and should have never bought a home? (Or their stock recommendations)

Like Jon Stewart said, “If I had listened to them, I would be a millionaire, that is, if I had started out with $100 million.” Their coding is screwed up so here’s the best i could do here’s the link to the video. 

Real Estate

For Some, Foreclosed Homes Equals Gold.

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gold

Foreclosed homes are a buying opportunity if you have the cash. For some investors, speculators and first time home buyers are thinking big and finding opportunities in plummeting home prices. A gold lining in the Golden State’s housing crash.

According to the The News

“For many young couples, plummeting prices and near record-low interest rates make it possible to own a home in California for the first time.

Investors and real estate speculators, meanwhile, can snap up foreclosed properties on the cheap to sell during the next boom in California’s boom and bust real estate cycle, a boom they believe is inevitable and possibly not far off”

“This is a buying opportunity of our lifetime,” said Bruce Norris, who heads an investment group that expects to purchase 100 homes in Southern California.”

The article mentions the group buying a home for $55,000 that originally was worth $360,000 at the top of the market, putting $30,000 into it for repairs and renting it $1,200 a month. I would say that’s a fantastic investment. 

I know an investor who bought homes during the last real estate downturn. He bought thirteen homes and turned them all into rentals. When his company told him three years ago that they were moving to Texas and if he wanted a job, he would have to move there. He’s still here, doing well living off of the income from his rentals and building a new home in Lake Tahoe.

Yes, now is the time to buy, if you have a secure job or money to invest, if you want an investment that has proven time and again that you can become wealthy buying real estate.

Real Estate

Facing Foreclosure, Hire an Attorney?

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The Golden Rule, He who has the gold Rules
The Golden Rule, He who has the gold Rules

Hiring an attorney is usually the last thing I tell a client to do. It’s expensive and normally you can work things out with the party in question if both sides are willing to talk and negotiate.

However, the more I hear from friends and clients, it seems that the only way to get a bank or mortgage company to listen to you is to hire an attorney.

I just heard two more stories of people approaching their bank and was told, you’re making the payments, we don’t want to talk to you until you quit making your payments. In another case, the person tried for two months to modify their loan and finally gave up.

However, the person then hired an attorney and the bank immediately started modifying the loan. I don’t get it, why force a home owner who is under stress to spend an additional $1,500 to $5,000 to get their attention. 

In spite of article I recently read, the banks are not cooperating. The article went on to say that a client hired an attorney to represent them and the bank insisted on having a three way conversation with the bank, the client and the attorney. The bank said there was no need for legal representation; they would do all the work for free. Right, maybe you just need to hit the banks over the head to get their attention.