Florida Mortgage Lender Blog & Real Estate News

If you’re thinking of buying a Florida condo, then you’re probably looking forward to the convenience of condo life. Freedom from landscaping chores and home maintenance tasks is just ahead. But, first you must determine how much condo you can afford to buy.

Before you do anything else, make a detailed list of your finances. You’ll need to factor in all your income, and list all your normal monthly debts. Make a separate section for things you don’t want to do without, but can if it's required. These are the first things that are eliminated when looking to save money in your budget.

Next make a budget for your household. Remember to include extras like going out to eat. A good budget will have all of these elements:

· Fixed expenses. These include food, clothing, housing costs, car payment, even taxes that are regularly billed are included in this category.

· Retirement. At least 10% of your income should go into a retirement account.

· Savings. This is any money that has been put aside for big purchases, to pay off debts, or for home repairs. Your savings budget should be 20% of your income.

· Miscellaneous. You should put 10% away to cover entertainment expenses. Going out to dinner and a movie would come out of this section.

Most finance experts will recommend that you don’t spend more than twenty-eight percent of your income on housing costs. Still, some lenders may offer loan packages that are more than what you have budgeted to spend. No matter how great that Florida condo deal sounds, you need to stick to your budget.

Once you know how much you can afford to pay for your Florida condo, you can shop around for the best mortgage rates and loan terms for your personal situation. With careful planning, you can avoid making a mortgage mistake, and getting more house than you can afford.

Need more help determining how much mortgage you can afford? Give us a call today at 407-876-5771 and we will give you my professional advice.

I hate to say I told you so, but on May 1st and again on June 1st, I told you about the potential negative ramifications of the Home Valuation Code of Conduct. Today the Realtors confirmed what I had been hearing all across the mortgage industry.

“In the past month, we have suddenly been bombarded with many stories of, at the last moment, transactions falling apart because appraisals are coming in unrealistically low,” said National Association of Realtors Chief Economist Lawrence Yun. “As a result it opens up a new round of negotiations between a buyer and a seller or in many cases the buyer just steps away.”  complete story

Source: CNBC .com - Diana Olick

Then think of your home mortgage as the lost ark. It’s called MERS, short for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, and it is the keeper of your loan. Nope, not your bank, lender, broker, investor, but Virginia-based MERS.

In order to save tons of cash on all the legal mumbo jumbo involved in documenting your loan and how it gets bought and sold and traded, lenders hire MERS, which is a private database, emphasize private. It is currently used by about 3,000 financial services firms.

Since MERS is the final resting place for loans, it is also the name on the foreclosure documents. As the foreclosure crisis deepens, savvy lawyers are helping borrowers avoid foreclosure by demanding to know who owns the loan in question. Judges want to know as well, but MERS wouldn’t or couldn’t say…until now.  complete story

Source: CNBC.com - Diana Olick

The shameless liars at CNN and other so-called, U.S. news outlets are again talking about a “bottom” in the U.S. housing market – and trying to entice more victims to jump in. However, the reality is that mortgage statistics show that it has been obvious all along that the collapse in the U.S. real estate market will continue to get worse until at least 2011.

With more than one in ten U.S. mortgages (of all categories) already in default, the biggest wave of “adjustable-rate mortgage” re-sets does not begin until next year – and then will remain at that peak level for at least one full year.

Small banks facing severe loan losses and in need of capital continue to operate, indicating a reluctance on behalf of regulators to shut them down.

Maybe the so-called "zombie" banks didn't die after all.

As recently as two months ago, many on Wall Street speculated that the nation's largest financial institutions -- banks like Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) and Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) -- were only operating as a result of extensive aid from the U.S. government.

Now, many experts wonder how so many small regional and community lenders that are capital starved and overwhelmed by escalating loan losses are able to stay in business.

In metropolitan Atlanta and the state of Florida, for example, more than 50 banks reported non-performing asset levels of 10% or more of total assets as of the end of March, according to the Raleigh, N.C.-based investment bank Carson Medlin.

Non-performing assets are loans that are not collecting interest or principal payments. In more normal economic times, non-performing asset levels remain below 1%.

Up to this point, small lenders, which serve as the primary source of credit for large parts of the country, were considered a picture of health in the banking industry. Most avoided the toxic mortgage products that ruined so many of their big bank peers.

Experts note that the majority of the 8,000 small banks are still thriving. But the outlook for this corner of the nation's banking industry has been tempered in recent weeks as small lenders endure rising losses, partly as a result of exposure to areas like commercial real estate and small business loans.

Next Wednesday, Wall Street will get a clearer sense of what kind of shape the industry is in when the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. publishes its first-quarter assessment of the industry. One closely-watched part of that report is the agency's so-called "problem bank" list.

As of the end of 2008, that number stood at 252 institutions and it is expected to have climbed even higher during the first three months of 2009.

So far this year, the government has closed 34 banks, including the FDIC's takeover and subsequent sale of Florida-based lender BankUnited (BKUNA) late Thursday to a group of private equity investors. complete story

Source: CNNMoney.com - David Ellis

Stop Foreclosure & Save Your Credit SELL your Home - Short Sale

Prime fixed-rate loans have finally leapfrogged those nasty subprimes to take the lead in the race to foreclosure. The foreclosure rate on primes has in fact doubled in the last year, and almost half of the overall increase in foreclosure starts in the first quarter of this year was due to the increase in primes.

I got a call yesterday from Scott Scredon at the Consumer Credit Counseling Services in Atlanta. He says they’ve seen a distinct change in callers. “We’re getting calls from engineers and attorneys and post graduate students,” he says. “Many of these people run through their 401Ks and their savings and start living off credit cards and then they call a counseling agency for help. So it’s a new kind of person we’re seeing today, but it’s a sign of the times.”

So I asked Jay Brinkmann, chief economist over at the Mortgage Bankers Association, why all these aggressive industry and government modification programs aren’t helping, especially if the troubled borrowers are not in those nasty, exotic subprime loans. complete story

Source: CNBC.com - Diana Olick 

Stop Foreclosure  Save Your Credit Florida Short Sales

As job losses rise, growing numbers of American homeowners with once solid credit are falling behind on their mortgages, amplifying a wave of foreclosures.

In the latest phase of the nation’s real estate disaster, the locus of trouble has shifted from subprime loans — those extended to home buyers with troubled credit — to the far more numerous prime loans issued to those with decent financial histories.

With many economists anticipating that the unemployment rate will rise into the double digits from its current 8.9 percent, foreclosures are expected to accelerate. That could exacerbate bank losses, adding pressure to the financial system and the broader economy.

“We’re about to have a big problem,” said Morris A. Davis, a real estate expert at the University of Wisconsin. “Foreclosures were bad last year? It’s going to get worse.” 

Economists refer to the current surge of foreclosures as the third wave, distinct from the initial spike when speculators gave up property because of plunging real estate prices, and the secondary shock, when borrowers’ introductory interest rates expired and were reset higher.

“We’re right in the middle of this third wave, and it’s intensifying,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “That loss of jobs and loss of overtime hours and being forced from a full-time to part-time job is resulting in defaults. They’re coast to coast.”

Those sliding into foreclosure today are more likely to be modest borrowers whose loans fit their income than the consumers of exotically lenient mortgages that formerly typified the crisis.

Economy.com expects that 60 percent of the mortgage defaults this year will be set off primarily by unemployment, up from 29 percent last year. complete story

Source: The New York Times - Peter S. Goodman & Jack Healy

Stop Foreclosure & Save Your Credit SELL your Home - Short Sale