California Home Loan information

How much can the seller credit the buyer towards closing costs? It is a simple question and it will get you a complicated answer. The maximum allowable contribution from the seller (and/or Realtor) depends on the down payment and occupancy. The rules I am quoting are Federal rules for a Fannie Ma...

Yes, I am a full time mortgage professional and the loan I have on my house is a 30 year fixed rate of 5.625%. Why didn’t I refinance into something better you ask. Because my Total Loan to Value is too high to get a new loan to refinance my home.  I am sharing this to shed light on a subject in ...

 We have issues in our real estate market right now.  Inventory is low and there are still a good number of foreclosures on the market and short sales are taking forever. Add in the low rates and a good number of people who want to buy a house right now and we have our current market.  I have an ...

This is the worst question to ask a mortgage lender, period. Not because their rates may not be as good as the other guys, but because they are pretty dang close to the other guys rates usually. Mortgage rates are a moving target and change on a daily basis and sometimes more than once per day. T...

  OK, everyone is talking about HARP 2.0 and so let's define it.     um.... no!     cute, but still no.  Nice but a different kind of HARP.    It is an acronym and it stands for Home Affordable Refinance Program First of all, since it is 2.0 that means that the program was already around and what...

Caveat emptor - Let the buyer beware! I have just read a bunch of blog posts here in Active rain discussing how people choose their real estate or mortgage professional. These seem to have been from peer to peer blogs and I wanted to write this one to the public. All of the blogs had one thing in...

I have my own APP! I used to joke that if you needed to get a home loan, I had an App for that! Get it? I have a loan APPlication for that....... Yeah, nobody else thought it was that funny either. Now I actually do have my own App at the apple store and I have a Blackberry App as well and it wil...

I have sort of forgotten to be whimsical lately and it had really helped me in the past. I was inspired just today by Irene Kennedy and her blog post is the impetus for this blog. See below: Irene Kennedy - Dancing Realtor from New Jersey I have been working with video with my clients for years a...

I speak with people all day long about home loans and what they want and how to get it for them. Many times there is confusion about how the system works and whether they should go with a big bank, local credit union, loan broker or a mortgage banker. The reality is that there are some clients wh...

Reverse Mortgage.....HUH?!? Well a reverse mortgage is basically when we pay you instead of you paying us. Sound good? You can take your money in a lump sum, equity line or monthly payments for the rest of your life. You can even get a reverse mortgage to buy a house. So what's the catch? There a...