The Top 10 Reasons

1. First off, I really do not think anybody should be buying a home for any reason until 2010. There is nothing stopping home values dropping around the country. What needs to happen first is we need to have a leveling out period.

2. Home prices are expected to drop in the greater Detroit, MI area another 8% by May 2009. CNN wrote an article analyzing data and what home prices should be doing. In there you will see Detroit, MI going down 8.6% and Farmington Hills going down 5.9%. This is one of the first charts I have seen that I agree with. Its probably because it was not written by the National Realtors Association. Realtors will always tell you its a great time to buy…mainly because its how they get paid.

3. Shouldn’t this be the time that you want to buy?

1. People trying to refinance their home after having it listed for sale are about to run into a big road block. Refinancing a home after being listed is one of the biggest underwriting guidelines that has to be passed. This is not about you, its about the mortgage company.

2. Most mortgage companies like Quicken Loans for instance have very particular guidelines when it comes to this. With all of the homes listed for sale around the country this is one that can become a real deal breaker. Depending on the company, many have a 12 month delisting period. Some will have a 6 month but for the most part its 12.

3. What does this mean? You need to be able to show the mortgage company that you have taken your house off of the market. You can do this by getting a de-listing

1. With this never ending housing/mortgage fiasco going on we need to take a look at some ways to correct the situation. With the U.S Government deciding to pass this stupid $700 Billion Bailout Plan which was supposed to correct the instability in the stock market (we all knew it was not going to work as the stock market has dropped below 10,000 points for the first time in 4 years since after passing it) with the U.S Government buying up all of these bad loans. Doesn’t the U.S Government print up this money in the first place? How did they let it get to this in the first place?

2. The mortgage lending system kind of works like this. The Federal Reserve has the power to set interest rates and to determine when they should open up the spickets to flood more money into the economy (thus

1. If Congress passes the $700 billion bailout plan this would be one of the biggest mistakes ever in the history of the United States. It blows my mind to think about how we even got into this situation but its probably why I write about the mortgage industry so much. If this stupid bill gets passed it could ultimately lead to the end of the United States as we know it. What’s that you say, the United States can’t fail? I understand what you are saying. Hey, do you think you could go over to Europe and talk to somebody from the Roman Empire for me? I want you to ask them how the most powerful civilization in the history of the world is doing. Just one person, that’s it. What’s that? There is no Roman Empire anymore? How could this be?

2. I am not sure on the exact

1. Buying a home with a home equity line of credit might be tricky nowadays but if you can do it I would suggest to look into it. It is probably not the first home loan that you are going to look at buying a piece of property with, but it is very advantageous in many financial kind of ways.

2. Most people start the mortgage shopping process by comparing different mortgage companies interest rates on the 30 year fixed rate mortgage. This is a safe bet and 9 out 10 times should be the way that most people go about picking the right mortgage for them. Its a way that people will know exactly what their payment will be until the day they pay it off. No surprises with that one. It usually comes down to picking

1. Many people over the past 5 years who bought homes thought they were getting rich by buying bigger homes. Many were told that homes always went up in value and that they needed to get into the market as soon as possible before prices went up more. With history on your side, buying a home was the safe bet because they were going up in value across the U.S at an alarming rate. Little did the home buyer know, that they were about to become house poor.

2. House poor is a relatively new term. You never really heard any terms like negative amortization mortgage, option arm loans, or adjustable rate mortgage before the refi boom. They became common place during the refi boom and were supposed to be good home loans. Unfortunately they were some of the

1. Being self employed is a lot of people’s dream. Being able to call your own hours, be your own boss, take vacations when you want, earn as much money as you want to earn, write offs on your taxes, etc. For most people though this is hardly the case. Most people that are self employed do not mind working more because they usually like what they are doing. Most self employed people struggle to get their businesses off of the ground and most do fail either because of poor planning, under funding, or lack of will power to keep on pushing.

2. Besides all of the issues to get your small business going where it really hurts self employed people the most is trying to get financing for anything. If you just quit your day job and are going to go at your small business 100% than you better be ready

1. Well, it actually is kind of official today that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are bankrupt. CNN has the low down on why it happened. The unfortunate part is that they really are not bankrupt. I think its interesting how two organizations that were started by the U.S Government are now being bailed out by the U.S Government. It really makes me want to say “WTF?”

2. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were set in place to help free up more money for banks to lend too. In the good old days, banks could only lend in mortgages what they had in their own accounts. As an example, the money they could lend would come from the money you deposited with them for your checking or savings account. The bank would pay you a small rate of return on your money and would lend it out. This is

1. The FHA loan has became popular once again over the past 6 months mainly due to it being one of the only 100% financing loans able to use to buy a home. With all of the major mortgage companies going bankrupt around the country they all lost their ability to use their own loans. What I mean by using their own loans is that many companies, let’s say Quicken Loans for example worked with larger banks and investment firms and they wrote their own guidelines. This means that they made their own rules and as long as a bunch of underwriting guidelines were met than the loan could be written and sold on the secondary market for a profit.

2. Realtors loved this during the days of the refi/purchase boom. Since the mortgage companies had their own guidelines a

1. Since 2006 some 270 major lending institutions have failed and gone bankrupt. This does not include the other hundreds or thousands of other people who got their mortgage brokers license hoping to make a quick buck only to fail when the housing bubble burst. What is really crazy to think is how many people lost their jobs within those 270 companies. Estimates right now are in the 100,000 range. This includes everybody from the loan processor, the mortgage banker, IT people, and leadership with the company.

2. When the new housing bill came out it came out with a bunch of new standards that the mortgage industry is going to have to follow. All of the major mortgage companies that are left and still surviving have already gotten rid of sub-prime loans such as the negative amortization mortgage.