An interesting article on US News was titled “forget the mortgage, I’m paying my credit card bill…“  A recent study by transunion credit company showed that out of Americans who are current on their credit card bills, and increased 6.6% of them fell behind on their mortgage.  And the number of consumers behind on their [...]

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As I see it, you have two choices when looking for a new home or Mission Viejo apartments . You can either (A) live closer to work and enjoy a short commute while paying a higher rent/mortgage or (B) live further away from work and enjoy lower-cost housing while struggling with a time-consuming and frustrating [...]

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During the boom times for real estate in this decade people were buying homes with $0 down, interest only loans, and jumping into home purchases with friends, family, and new significant others.  Mortgage options like subprime mortgages, Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs),  Reverse Mortgages, FHA mortgages proliferated during this period as they were extremely popular amongst [...]

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A new academic paper by Arizona Law Professor Brent T White has people talking, called “Underwater and Not walking away: Shame, Fear, and Social Management of the Housing Crisis.”  He suggests that people walk away from their mortgages because it will take years to recoup their losses.
More interestingly, he suggests that if the 15 milllion [...]

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I don’t know if I’ve ever crunched the numbers hard on the first place we’d ever bought.  The first place we ever bought in 2002 was a 570 sq foot, one bedroom condo.  We paid $150k and sold it in 2005 for $250k.  The closing costs were minimal at the time, $2k I think.  We [...]

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Right now I’m not able to refinance and neither are some friends of mine.  For different reasons, but we’re both pretty much stuck with what we have.
I considered refinancing our mortgage because we’re in an Adjustable Rate Mortgage (ARM).  A fantastic rate ARM, 4.25% for another 3 years, total 7/1 ARM.  It even caps out [...]

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A new study published finds that homeowners with good credit, no late payments are choosing to walk away from their homes and trash their credit, lose their homes. Why?  Why would responsible people make such a decision?
It’s a calculated gamble.
A gamble that it makes more financial sense to leave behind a financial mess and start [...]

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This is a fun calculation for both homeowners and renters.  What does your home cost you daily?  We can use 30 days a month, and we should try to add in everything.  For homeowners this includes the mortgage, property taxes, insurance, maintenance, utilities.  For renters the same.  Obviously it’ll cost less if you rent than [...]

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A recent paper from Economists at the University of Chicago states that 26% of mortgage defaulters do so willingly. What that means?  That means people are CHOOSING to default and walk away from their homes because they owe more than the home is worth.  They are “underwater” on their mortgage.
The authors state this is not [...]

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Yesterday I talked about categorizing the budget.  I said we spent 28% on our gross income on PITI and home maintenance last year.  We didn’t have huge maintenance expenses last year our PITI includes our mortgage, taxes, home association fees, and property taxes.
So did we buy too much house?  We’re under the correct guidelines according [...]

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