Archive for the 'Real Estate' Category
You guys were right. Less than a month since we closed on our mortgage loan, we are already getting bombarded with letters offering “mortgage life insurance”. The official-looking letters seem like they are from your lender, but are really just another piece of junk mail.
The pitch is pretty simple - it will pay off your entire mortgage in the event of your death. You don’t want your family to lose their home, do you? *sniff* *sniff* If I do it soon, I don’t even have to submit to a medical exam. (This is not the same as Private Mortgage Insurance or PMI, which is to protect the lender when you have a small downpayment.) The problem is that it’s usually a better idea to simply buy a plain term life insurance policy with a comparable or greater cash payout. Here’s why:
Term Life Insurance Offers More Flexibility
So let’s see, if I buy mortgage protection insurance and die then my loan is paid off. What about the rest of the monthly bills? Childcare? The house isn’t everything. Wouldn’t you rather leave your family a lump sum of cash to do whatever you want with, rather than have a paid-off home with all of the equity stuck inside? They could even buy an annuity to replicate your income.
Mortgage Life Insurance Has A Shrinking Payout
Remember, this insurance only covers the mortgage. As the years pass, you keep paying premiums, but your loan balance keeps on shrinking! After 10 or 20 years, your benefit will be greatly reduced. Compare this with most term life insurance policies which offer a fixed payout.
Oh, and don’t be fooled by a “return of premium” (ROP) feature. Sure, they’ll refund 100% of your premiums at the end of the term. Not only does this cost more than non-ROP insurance, but that’s ignoring the fact that in the meantime they’ve been investing your premiums and making lots of money off of it (which you could have been doing instead). And if you miss just one premium payment you’ll be disqualified.
Term Life Insurance Is Probably Cheaper
Insurance is all about statistics. If the policy requires “no medical exam”, then it’s going to be more expensive in order to cover everyone. If you don’t smoke and are in average or above-average health, then you should simply apply for insurance that does require a medical exam. Now, if you are in poor health, then this might be an opportunity to get some insurance that otherwise might not be available to you. But remember that there are also a few no-medical-exam term life insurance companies out there.
Mortgage Protection Life Insurance Is Hugely Profitable
In addition, simply since this product is marketed by fear (remember your homeless family!) and primarily through unsolicited mailings, it has a higher profit margin and thus higher cost than regular term life insurance. This is supported by this InsWeb article that states:
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) says that mortgage insurance lenders pay out only about 40 cents in benefits for every dollar consumers spend buying that type of policy, compared with 90 cents on the dollar paid out to consumers who hold regular term life policies.
60% profit vs. 10% profit! I wouldn’t even bother myself, but if you must, simply comparing quotes with an insurance comparison website like SelectQuote will provide you an easy answer as to which is a better deal.
Posted in Insurance, Real Estate | 16 Comments »
With my new fat mortgage, I’m considering whether to also take out a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELoC). This is not a home equity loan where you take out a lump sum at a fixed rate, but is a line of credit usually at a variable rate. I think of it as a credit card that is secured by my house (!). I don’t plan on actually using it, but I think it might nice to have around as long as the upfront costs to me are minimal. Here’s why:
Safety Net / Emergency Funds
Although having adequate emergency funds in cash is always preferable, it is nice to know that you have a HELOC as a backup in case of prolonged job loss or health problems. It’s always better to line up credit ahead of time while you have good credit rather than when you are already desperate. Using a HELOC can be preferable over paying sky-high credit card interest or falling behind bills (late fees, damaged credit score). Ironically, you might even use it to temporarily keep current on your mortgage to avoid penalties or even foreclosure. Let’s hope not.
Cheap and Flexible
The nice thing about a HELOC with no fees is that if you don’t take any money out, you don’t pay anything. And because the money is secured by your home, this assurance makes your interest rate relatively low. The rate is usually close to the WSJ Prime rate, which is currently 6% APR. On top of that, your interest paid might even be tax-deductible.
The interest is accrued daily, which makes it good for quick loans. So if you do need to take out $10,000 on short notice and you don’t have the cash on hand, using a HELOC might be the most economical way to do it. At 6%, your interest owed on $10,000 is only $1.64 a a day. Of course, for many folks this convenience might just provide too much temptation. All debt can turn into a double-edged sword. Know thyself, is all I can say.
Tool for Credit Card Profit Games
Here’s a trick to go along with making money with 0% balance transfers that is a good example of that flexibility. With certain credit card issuers it can be difficult to turn your balance transfer into cash in your pocket, especially when you have no existing balances. But here’s an example of how to use your HELOC to extract $10,000:
- Request a balance transfer from your 0% APR credit card for $10,000 directly to your HELOC. Since this is loan they won’t mind at all.
- Shortly before the balance transfer is scheduled to arrive, write a check for $10,000 from the HELOC to your interest-bearing bank account. Now you have created a temporary $10,000 debt at 6% and $10,000 bank balance earning ~4% (minus some possible lost days of interest).
- When the balance transfer payment arrives a fews days to a week later, your HELOC debt will be paid off.
- A week’s worth of interest at 6% APR ion $10,000 is only $11.50. And that is partially countered by interest earned in your savings account.
- Voila! For around ten bucks, you now have $10,000 at 0% APR in your bank account to do as you wish.
Finding a HELOC - What To Look Out For
Now, I don’t want a home equity line if it’s going to cost me a bundle. Here’s a quick rundown of important factors when looking for a HELOC, based on an article by the Mortgage Professor.
- Introductory rate and period. Temporary teaser rate to suck you in.
- Margin. This is usually how your non-teaser interest rate is determined, relative to the Prime rate.
- Minimum draw. How long can you take money out?
- Required average balance. Do you have to take some money out?
- Upfront lender fees. These days, you should be able to eliminate these.
- Upfront third party fees. Harder to get waived, but try.
- Annual fee. Just say no, again. Sometimes only waived for first year.
- Cancellation fee. Many have these, I guess so you don’t bail and go to another bank. This is especially the case if they waive all the upfront costs above, since they are losing money on you so far. As long as you can keep your balance at $0 with no fees, just keep it open and don’t use it.
I see a lot of competition out there now that rates are low, so definitely shop around. As a data point, I just saw a special offer from Bank of America for a no closing cost, no application fee, no annual fee HELOC. Don’t forget to try your local credit unions as well.
Posted in Credit Cards, Real Estate | 42 Comments »
From Washington, D.C. to New York City, from Atlanta to Portland, a huge part of finding a house is balancing the desire to have a shorter commute to work and the higher price tag that inevitably comes with it. Some people live farther away to spend less, while others simply want more house for the same price. I know people who commute 2 hours each way, every day. They are not alone - According to the NY Times, the Census Bureau states that nearly 18 percent of New Jersey workers leave their homes before 6:30 a.m. every day. Nationwide, over 3.4 million workers take more than 1.5 hours to get to work one-way. That’s a 95% increase since 1990.
How do you strike a balance? It’s easy to measure how the housing prices drop the farther you go out. Just look at the MLS listings. As one quote puts it - “Keep driving until you can afford it.” However, it’s harder to measure the many costs of a longer commute.
Increased Car Costs: Gas, Depreciation, Repairs, and Maintenance
The more you drive, the more all these costs add up. Let’s say I want to move 20 miles further out. If I get 25 miles/gallon in commuter traffic and gas costs $3.50 a gallon, and I work 22 weekdays per month, that works out to an extra $120 per month in gas alone.
That also amounts to an extra 10,600 miles of driving each year. So more oil changes, more frequent repairs and other maintenance. Your car might depreciate faster by an extra $1,000 per year. That could work out easily at least another $100-$150 per month.
Treating Commute Time As Unpaid Work Time
Now what if we convert that commute time to actual paid working time. If you earned $30 per hour x extra 2 hours commuting per weekday x 22 weekdays per month x 12 months = $16,000 per year (essentially 25% more). Even if you don’t get paid hourly, there is some value involved. Imagine if you used that time to perform better at work and impress your boss, or if you used it to start a business of your own.
Let’s use the very rough multiplier that you can afford a mortgage that costs 3 times your gross income. Saving an extra $270 per month in car costs would let you theoretically buy $10,000 more house by living closer. Earning another $16,000 more per year would let you theoretically buy $48,000 more house. Earn $60 per hour, and that’d be $96,000. I just pulled some numbers from the air here, but the idea is simply that there hard costs involved with that longer commute.
Effect of Fatigue On Work, Family, and Happiness
Forget the extra wear and tear on your car, what about the extra wear and tear on you. If I had just spent two hours in traffic, by the time I get to work I’d be tired and ready for a break. My work quality would suffer. Then instead of arriving back home by 6 or 7 pm, now you’re looking at 8 or 9 pm. You don’t have time to cook, so you buy take-out. It costs more and is less nutritious for your family. You have less time to exercise, less time to play, less time to relax. You get the picture.
From the BusinessWeek article Extreme Commuting:
This is what economists call “the commuting paradox.” Most people travel long distances with the idea that they’ll accept the burden for something better, be it a house, salary, or school. They presume the trade-off is worth the agony. But studies show that commuters are on average much less satisfied with their lives than noncommuters. A commuter who travels one hour, one way, would have to make 40% more than his current salary to be as fully satisfied with his life as a noncommuter, say economists Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer of the University of Zurich’s Institute for Empirical Research in Economics. People usually overestimate the value of the things they’ll obtain by commuting — more money, more material goods, more prestige — and underestimate the benefit of what they are losing: social connections, hobbies, and health. “Commuting is a stress that doesn’t pay off,” says Stutzer.
Got Public Transportation?
While not a complete solution, all of this gets reduced if you have decent public transportation. The costs are most likely lower than driving, you might get some work done en route, or at least you’ll arrive less stressed. I’ve already noticed that housing near good public transportation commands a premium, and it should.
Our Experience
We really wanted to have a short commute, but we still ended up with a compromise like many others. We looked at houses that were 15 minutes from work and play, but they simply cost too much. So, we moved farther out where the houses were newer and cheaper. But thankfully not too far. Our commute is still about 45 minutes each way if we had to drive during rush hour. However, whenever we can we try to shift our hours earlier or later to make it more like 20-25 minutes. My main worry is that as time goes on the commute will only become longer and longer.
Posted in Family, Real Estate | 55 Comments »
I’m trying to build a coherent series on the home-buying process, so to help me organize here is an index of posts that I’ve already written so far. Those with no links are outlines for future posts. If you think something is missing or want me to cover a specific topic, just leave a comment. Thanks!
Should I Buy A House?
Buying a house isn’t necessarily the best choice for everyone. There are lots of different pros and cons.
Finding a Real Estate Agent
Finding and Choosing A Home
If you do want to buy a house, what do you look for in a home?
Mortgage Basics: Choosing Loan Types
You found a home, so how are you going to pay for it?
Mortgage Practicalities: Choosing A Specific Lender & Interest Rate/Points
Making An Offer, Inspections, Escrow, and Closing
- Making and reading the offer contract
- Ordering Inspections, Asking For Concessioins
- Snags and Delays
- Signing Day
Housing-Related Humor
Buying a house is a serious and stressful endeavor. Watching these videos is not. 
Posted in Real Estate | 17 Comments »
“Good” Credit Card Debt
If you’re a new reader, you may have some concerns about my high levels of credit card debt. I’m actually taking money from 0% APR balance transfer offers and instead of spending it, I am placing it in high-yield savings accounts that actually earn me 4% interest or more, and keeping the difference as profit! Along with other deals that I blog about, this helps me earn extra side income of thousands of dollars a year. Recently I put together a series of step-by-step posts on how I do this. Please check it out first if you have any questions. This is why, although I have the ability to pay the balances off, I choose not to.
Cash Savings, Home Purchase
If my posting has been a bit light lately, it has been because I’ve been bogged down by a combination of illness, travel, and the home-buying process. Also, I didn’t want to do it in real-time because there were some snags along the way… but we’ve finally closed!! I have lots of house-related posts coming about mortgages, inspections, and so on… but first here are a few details that will help explain this net worth update.
| Purchase price |
$600,000 |
| Down payment (20%) |
$120,000 |
| Discount points paid (1%) |
$6,000 |
| Buyer’s agent rebate (1.5%) |
$9,000 |
| Closing Costs |
~$3,000 (rest paid by lender) |
Our purchase price of $600,000 was more than the $500,000 we estimated we wanted to spend a couple years ago, but we are now in a 4-bedroom single-family home that we can see ourselves living in forever. In addition, we didn’t stretch too far as we can handle the mortgage payment on either one of our incomes.
We believe we got a good deal even though the short-term market looks bad, and the house has tons of potential. We’re even going to rent out a room to a relative. Our home appraisal actually came in at $640,000 - we’ve been told an appraisal coming in higher than purchase price doesn’t happen very much in this scared housing market. Using this value would actually leave our home equity at $160,000 instead of just the down payment of $120,000. However, I’m just going to be conservative and leave it at $120,000 for now.
As you can see, our 50% buyer’s agent rebate helped offset our closing costs and the points on the loan. Of course, mentally we are using the $9,000 rebate towards all the home improvement projects we have brewing. Finally, adding back in the $5,000 earnest deposit that I had marked as spent last month makes the numbers look a lot better than they really were.
Emergency Fund?
Our net cash balances have taken a big hit to less than $10,000, and that makes me nervous given that our monthly expenses just shot up drastically. Our foreseeable mid-term goal will definitely need to be to build up a proper emergency fund, which we’ve never officially had since we basically treated our downpayment funds as such. Visiting Brazil and Australia will have to be placed on the backburners for now…
Retirement and Brokerage accounts
February is the fourth month is a row that our IRAs and 401k/403bs have dropped by 3%. We may need to start setting up some regular monthly investments in order to help force ourselves to keep investing.
It’s been a wild month! You can see our previous net worth updates here.
Posted in Goals, Investing, Real Estate, Retirement | 60 Comments »
Here’s a quick graph that I didn’t include in my previous post on choosing between 15, 30, or 40-year mortgages…
I’ve always felt that loan lengths were a bit arbitrary. Why did 15-year and 30-year loans become the industry standard? It’d be just as easy to make a 25-year mortgage. So I took a step back and compared term length vs. monthly payment for a $300,000 mortgage at 5.5%. The result was interesting, and I would think the general behavior should be consistent across different loan amounts and interest rates:
The graph shows that mortgage payment stops decreasing very much as the term goes past 20 years, and really starts to flatten after 30 years. If you use the 30-year as the benchmark, the 20-year payment is 20% higher, while the 40-year payment is only 9% less. Stretching even further from 40-years to 50-years only saves you another 5%.
Given this information, you’d think that having to get a 40-year mortgage should be a sign that you really can’t afford that house. Yet according to Bankrate, 25% of all new mortgages in California are 40-year mortgages (nationwide it’s more like 5-10%). This is partially due to the fact that pseudo-government Fannie Mae buys 40-year mortgages now. In fact, the mortgage industry has already rolled out 50-year amortizations for certain adjustable-rate mortgages. The next few years for housing should be really interesting…
Posted in Real Estate | 26 Comments »
I am often asked where is the best place to open one’s first IRA. Usually it’s a Roth IRA, since people tend to start out in lower tax brackets and Roth IRA save you taxes upon withdrawal. Choosing a one’s broker is still a very personal decision so I don’t think there is one single best broker for everyone, but here are the ones I would recommend to my friends and family, so I would also recommend them to anyone. First, some assumptions:
- You want to invest in low-cost funds or ETFs. Not every believe in this style of investing, but I do. If you wish to trades stocks all day or chase 5-star Morningstar funds, then my suggestions might not be the best fit fo you.
- You want low commission costs and account fees. By this, I mean you want the basic services at a good price. I don’t pay attention to things like streaming quotes, advanced trading software, options contracts, or if the website has AJAX everywhere.
- You wish to be an independent investor. If you want to pay for guidance, I still recommend taking the time to learn some of the basics, but please find a good fee-only advisor. They’ll probably set you up with a institutional account in which they can trade for you.
- You are just starting out. So you have anywhere from just $50 a month to $5,000 to put into an IRA. You may be worried about minimum balance requirements, and aren’t eligible for most premium accounts.
Mutual Fund Brokerages
These firms mainly trade their own mutual funds, which somewhat restricts investment choice. To generalize, mutual funds are better suited for people who wish to dollar-cost average and like simplicity.
Vanguard
- Commissions: Free to trade Vanguard mutual funds, although there may be certain redemption fees.
- Account fees: No account fees with electronic statements. Otherwise they may apply.
- Minimum to start: Most index funds have a minimum opening balance of $3,000. The STAR fund (VGSTX) lets you start with $1,000. More information here.
- Vanguard is the place where I hold all of my Roth and Rollover IRA balances. They offer a wide variety of both active and passive products, but I use them exclusively for their index funds. I like their all-in-one retirement funds for new investors.
T. Rowe Price
- Commissions: Free to trade TRP mutual funds, although there may be certain redemption fees.
- Account fees: $10 fore each mutual fund with less than $5,000. Not sure if this is waived for AAB.
- Minimum to start: Most funds have a minimum opening balance of $1,000 for IRAs. However, if you enroll in their Automatic Asset Builder (AAB) program and can commit $50 every month, the minimum requirement is waived and you can start with nothing. More information here.
- T. Rowe Price has index funds, but their expense ratios about about 0.25% higher than at Vanguard. However, their active funds have relatively low-costs and lower turnover compared to other actively-managed funds. I like the combination of the $50/month plan and one of their all-in-one retirement funds for those with limited funds starting out, although I don’t have an account here.
In case you’re curious, I’m leaving out Fidelity because their index funds have $10,000 minimums, and their active funds are more expensive in general than T. Rowe Price. I also don’t like their all-in-one retirement funds very much, as they seem to contain a slew of mediocre funds.
ETF & Stock Brokerages
There are lots of great ETFs out there now, including several from Vanguard, and having a stock brokerage account gives you great flexibility to buy any of them. However, you will be faced with potential per-trade commissions, so here are a few that have low fees. I have accounts with all of these firms.
Zecco Trading
- Commissions: Free for the 1st 10 trades per month if you have $2,500 in total account equity (cash + value of stocks). Otherwise, $4.50 per trade. Both limit and market.
- Account fees: $30 annual IRA fee.
- Minimum to start: No minimum balance to open.
- For more information, see my Zecco account review.
TradeKing
- Commissions: $4.95 per trade, limit or market.
- Account fees: No annual IRA fee.
- Minimum to start: No minimum balance to open.
- For more information, see my TradeKing account review.
Sharebuilder (now owned by ING Direct)
- Commissions:$4 for each pre-scheduled “window” trade purchase. $9.95 for a real-time trade and to sell. Alternative higher-volume plans also available. In addition, if you open an IRA by 4/15/08 and use the promotion code ‘IRA2008′, you’ll get 7 free trades good until 12/31/08.
- Account fees: $25 annual fee if you are in their basic plan. If you are on a plan with a monthly charge, or you have any account on such a plan, this fee is waived.
- Minimum to start: No minimum balance to open.
- For more information, see my ING Direct ShareBuilder review.
I hope that helps people with their research. You should also be aware of IRA termination and transfer-out fees if you wish to move, but these change all the time so by the time you want to leave they may be different. For more related posts on starting out in investing, please see my Rough Guide To Investing.
Posted in Investing, Real Estate | 62 Comments »
After I made the decision to get a fixed rate mortgage over one with an adjustable rate, the next was to decide what length to get. I thought this would be an easy decision, but there are a surprisingly large number of variables to consider!
Viewpoint #1: Get The Shortest Mortgage You Can Afford
With a longer term, you build equity more slowly but have more affordable payments. With a shorter term, face higher monthly payments but you own the home faster and pay less interest. So the traditional advice seems to be: get the shortest mortgage that you can afford.
This is can be a slippery slope, though. 15-year too expensive? Let’s try 30-year. No? How about 40-year? Hmm… barely. Well, maybe that ARM isn’t that bad after all… Affordability shouldn’t be the only consideration.
Viewpoint #2: Get The Longest Mortgage You Can Afford
In my previous post 10 Reasons You Should Never Pay Off Your Mortgage, I explored the reasons why certain financial advisors tell people to get the longest mortgage they can get. Basically, your mortgage is a cheap, long-term loan. If you re-invest this money into stocks, which over the long run are expected to return much more than 5-6% annually, why would you want a shorter loan? It’s a great arbitrage opportunity.
If you believe in this theory, then your answer is simple: get the longest mortgage you can afford, as long as the effective interest rate is lower than what you confidently can earn elsewhere.
Viewpoint #3: Longer Mortgages As Paying For Flexibility
Here’s the thing. Just because you have a 30-year mortgage doesn’t mean you have to take 30 years to pay it off. As long as you don’t have a prepayment penalty, you can simply send in additional money towards your loan principal and pay it off in 8, 15, or 23.5 years. However, if you have a 15-year mortgage, you have to make those higher payments every month or risk losing your home. So going for the longer term essentially sets you a “minimum payment”, which you can exceed as you wish. This can make a big difference if I run into extended unemployment or other large financial setbacks.
Example: 15-Year vs. 30-Year + Extra Principal
Of course, as you get a longer term, your interest rate will also go up a bit. But if you run the numbers, it actually doesn’t make that much difference! Let’s say that the 15-year is at 5.125% right now, but the 30-year is at 5.625%. The 15-year payment is $2,392, while the 30-year payment is $1,727 - a difference of $665.
However, if I just paid the $665 extra toward the 30-year mortgage each month, I still end up paying that 30-year loan off in less than 16 years! In exchange for the safety and flexibility of lower minimum payments, I stretched my 15-year loan out for an extra year. I view this extra interest as insurance.
Our Situation and Final Decision
In the case of Viewpoint #1, we can currently afford the payment for a 15-year mortgage. On the other hand, subscribing to Viewpoint #2 this would leave us wanting a 40-year mortgage at a relatively low 6% rate. However, while I see the merits of the arbitrage argument, I don’t necessarily think it’s an apples-to-apples comparison when you have two things with different risk/return characteristics.
I ended going with the 30-year fixed mortgage, primarily due to the reasons explained in Viewpoint #3. I am not against paying off our house early - I actually like the idea of having my home paid off as it would help simplify our income planning in retirement. (I could also treat paying it off early as owning a bond.) However, the flexibility of being able to make the lower payments as needed was a big draw, especially given the relatively small premium for doing so. Finally, if we rent the house out one day, the lower payment would also help with managing rental cashflow.
So why not a 40-year mortgage here as well? As you go longer, the mortgage payment stops dropping very much. A 40-year loan would involve an even higher rate and only lower our payment by 4%.
Posted in Real Estate | 43 Comments »
Conforming loans are those that satisfy the criteria that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac set regarding what kinds of loans they will buy. Besides certain credit-related guidelines like debt-to-income ratio, one major constraint is the maximum loan amount. Barring any upcoming changes (see below), the current limits are $417,000 in the continental US (AK, HI get $625,500).
Because they can be so readily sold to these psuedo-government entities, conforming loans are usually very competitively priced. Non-conforming loans have to be sold elsewhere or kept in-house, so they usually end with higher rates. But as recently as July 2007, the added cost for a non-conforming loan might have been only 0.20%. However, due to rising default rates and skeptical investors, the premium is currently around a full 1%. This has led to the increasing popularity of replacing a jumbo loan with two loans - a conforming one and a second loan to make up the difference.
Example. Let’s say you wanted to buy a $600,000 home, with a 20% down payment ($120,000). This leaves $480,000 to be financed, which is over the $417,000 conforming cap. With a single Jumbo loan, here’s your scenario. (I’ll use estimated mortgage rates based on current market conditions.)
But, here’s what happens when you split it up into a $417,000 conforming loan and a $63,000 second loan. The second loan usually has a higher interest rate, similar to that of a home equity loan.
By restructuring, you have lowered your effective interest rate nearly 50 basis points .from 6.5% to 6.01%, which in turn lowered the mortgage payment by $127 a month ($1,524 a year). To find the blended rate, I used the this Dinkytown calculator.
The Fine Print:
- This works best with small 2nd loans. Kind of obvious, but the less you have to put on the 2nd loan with higher interest, the better your blended rate would be. As the loan amount rises, there will likely be a point when the plain Jumbo loan will give you the lower payment.
- The second loan can be structured in a variety of ways. It could be a completely separate loan from a different lender, it could be a home equity loan from the same lender, or it could be a home equity line of credit.
- You might have balloon payments. In my case, I was offered a equity loan amortized over 30 years, but with a balloon payment due after 15 years. So I would need to either pay off that $63,000 within 15 years, or refinance before then.
- Possibly higher closing costs. The second loan may incur closing costs, but they should be a lot smaller than the first loan because things like appraisals have already been paid for.
- Conforming limits might change soon! The pending economic stimulus package legislation - which is almost on Bush’s desk as I type - proposes to temporarily raise the conforming limits to as high as $729,750 in “high cost” areas based on median home price. It is unknown how soon this will take effect, but probably too late for me. (Google News)
Posted in Real Estate | 21 Comments »
I’m curious as to where people initially found their mortgage loans, even if later on it was sold to someone else. Here are the options, along with a brief and very generalized impression of their pros and cons.
- National Banks. In general have above-average rates, but may have special programs for certain groups of people. May be more comfortable and/or reputable. Relatively rigid lending standards. Examples: Bank of America, Wells Fargo.
- Local Bank. May have a good relationship and be easier to communicate with, and may be more flexible with underwriting.
- Online Bank. May offer competitive rates, but the communication and service might not be as good. Example: ING Direct.
- Local Broker. May offer a better rate by shopping around for a wholesale rate and adding their commission. However, the quality and honesty of these brokers can vary wildly from great to subpar. The rates quoted might not actually materialize.
- Credit Union. Limited membership field, but may still offer good rates to members. Example: Navy Federal Credit Union.
- Online Broker. You can compare lenders online at a distance. However, the service again might not be that great. Example: LendingTree.com.
Here’s is the poll:
Loading …
Feel free to explain your decision in the comments if you have time!
Posted in Real Estate | 60 Comments »
I mentioned before that we plan to have just my wife apply for our new home mortgage loan, and not have my name on the mortgage at all. I had been playing around with this idea for months, but it looks like we will be going through with it. Here are some of my supporting reasons:
Helps Prevent Overspending On A House
One of our primary life goals is to be able to live on the equivalent of one income so that we can both work less and enjoy our lives. In order to do so, obviously we will need to maintain a reasonable housing payment. Although it’s clear now that lenders aren’t always the best judges of what is “affordable”, if we couldn’t qualify using only one of us, that would surely be a bad sign. While going through the pre-qualification process, we found banks willing to lend us over 5 times our income!
Although this is usually one of the main drawbacks of only having one spouse on the loan, but we actually saw it as a positive way to help us make sure we weren’t spending too much on a house.
Saves Time and Hassle
We want the best mortgage rate possible, so we are doing a full-documentation loan to prove our financial worthiness. Not only did I only recently finish school again, but a chunk of my income is self-employment income. Doing a full-doc loan with self-employment income involves a ton of scrutiny and at least 2 years of detailed profit/loss records. They also only take the average income over the last two years into consideration. It was simply easier and faster to submit my wife’s more stable and salaried job information.
Projecting A Better Credit Score
Sometimes one spouse has bad credit, so you want to keep their name off the mortgage in order to get a better rate. In our case, it wouldn’t have really mattered since we already got both our scores checked while getting pre-qualified. But my wife’s score is still slightly better than mine - since she doesn’t play silly credit card games - so we figured it wouldn’t hurt.
Leaves Room For Future Mortgage
After we buy the house, I still won’t have a mortgage on my credit report. Supposedly having a mortgage helps your score, but I’ve been doing just fine for over a decade without one, so it doesn’t matter to me. However, if later on I apply for a mortgage myself (investment property?), then I’ll be able to use my full income to qualify since I’ll have no other visible liabilities. Hopefully this will result in a better rate later on down the road as well.
Worst-Case Scenario
Although we never plan on taking advantage of this, if our home does get foreclosed upon, ideally only my wife’s credit score would be hurt as she is the only one responsible for the loan. Of course, I’d also lose my interest in the house.
Both Spouses Can Still Own The House
In our case, we plan on putting both our names on the title of the house with rights of survivorship. From what I’ve read, in many states both spouses have equal interests in any purchased house no matter who is on the mortgage, so it may not even matter.
So no mortgage for me! 
Let me know if I missed something, positive or negative.
Posted in Real Estate | 40 Comments »
This my second post on our experience in Finding A Buyer’s Agent. In Part 1, we tried our best to figure out what we wanted from an agent. Again, we are first-timers and are not real estate gurus. This is a long post, but it definitely shows a real story of how we found our agent - and how she helped us find our house!
Screening Tips
Given the hundreds if not thousands of real estate agents in our area, it was going to be a daunting task to find the “perfect” agent. We had to filter them down somehow. After reading up at a couple of books and websites about how to select a buyer’s agent, here’s what we were told:
- Ask trusted friends for recommendations. Ask about the reputation of both the agent and the brokerage house he/she works for.
- Ask potential agents for testimonials and references. A long list of references is good, but it’s unlikely you’ll hear from the unsatisfied folks.
- Check the local real estate board if your agent has any complaints against them. This is pretty unlikely in my experience, they aren’t exactly regulated that closely.
Our First Experience
First, we asked our friends and family for experiences. One of our family members actually used to be an agent, but she retired a while ago. Another family friend volunteered to be our agent, so we decided to try him out. It didn’t work out as he seemed to only want to show us certain houses in certain areas, and wasn’t very responsive to our specific requests. I guess we weren’t the ideal “let’s see 3 houses you recommend and we’ll just buy one of them” couple. Not wanting to mix friendship and business anymore, we decided to find our own agents from then on.
Interviewing Agents
After browsing some newspaper ads, I decided to visit HomeGain.com and used their free “Find a Realtor” feature to compare some agents. You provide your information like neighborhood, price range, etc. and then a bunch of agents try to create a custom “proposal” for you. However, it’s all done online through their interface, and none of your contact info is shared without your permission. I liked the idea of not keeping my name and phone number private. You also get client testimonials and their experience level. Here is a sample (click for full size):
Most of the proposals sounded the same… “I know all about your neighborhood, let me help you etc. etc.” We picked our favorite five, and asked them the same interview questions online:
Read the rest of this entry…
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It’s official! We have an signed offer contract on a house, our earnest check is sent, and we are in escrow. Apparently our timing couldn’t be worse as the world is apparently about to implode, but ah well. Here are some quick bits of information:
- The seller needed a quick sale, and we are buying as-is. We will have to hire a home inspector to make sure everything is acceptable.
- We believe our offer price to be a good deal. It was below asking, and significantly below comparable houses. We literally bid the 1st day on the market.
- The home price is more than we originally wanted to pay, but is still such that either one of us could qualify for the loan individually. Mortgage rates are also really low right now.
- It’s a fixer-upper, but the “bones” are great. It hasn’t been updated much since the late 80s, so it’s pretty ugly to a lot of buyers. We already have lots of remodeling plans.
- It’s a house that fit all of our criteria and more: good neighborhood, excellent schools, acceptable lot size, great square footage. If anything, the commute will be longer but we expected that.
- I’m acutely aware that the housing outlook is bleak right now, but that’s how it is - You’ll see how my decisions work out, good or bad. In any case, there is still a long ways to go until closing. Props to my wife for checking the MLS diligently every single day and making this happen!
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Up until a few years ago, the status quo was that the real estate agent who helps you buy your home get half of the 6% commission, so 3% of the sale price of your home. On an average (again, around here) $600,000 home, that’s $18,000. That may be split between the principal broker and the agent (unless you have an independent agent), but that’s still quite a pay day. Nowadays, there are several websites and agents who will offer you a cut of this 3% commission - often for a reduction in features. Here are a few of the more prominent ones:
(*Our eventual agent was found using this service.)
However, the National Association of Realtors is actively lobbying against this practice. Currently, these states ban buyer rebates: Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, and Wyoming.
But should this practice be illegal? Many people - most real estate agents - sure think so. I disagree, and find this stance very anti-consumer. Hey, I can understand not wanting to lower my income. But that’s capitalism. If an agent can operate well without rebates, then they should do so and refuse to offer any such rebates. But if someone else is willing to negotiate their fee, what’s wrong with that? I feel that like for any service provided, both the price and the features should be negotiable. Imagine every car costing $20,000 no matter what, every computer costing $1,000, every haircut costing $50. Yes, a discount agent might offer discount service. But a full-price agent can also offer poor service. In the end, each home buyer should be able to make their own value judgments.
Even our current arrangement is primarily a result of legacy and tradition, not logic. Until the 1990s, in many states there were no “buyer’s agents” at all. All agents represented the seller, which means they had a fiduciary responsibility to the seller - and only the seller. Only within the last decade or so have agents who solely represent the buyer become widely accepted. I believe commission rebates are simply the next evolution in real estate practices.
In the end, not everyone has the same needs. If someone wants a full-service agent who works for a big company like REMAX or Century 21, who will interview the client and figure out the best neighborhood for them, call them with updates every day, and drive them to each house in their nice car (why do they all drive either a Benz or a Lexus?), then they should have the right to do so. On the other hand, my agent has almost 20 years of experience, and is her own principal broker. She drives a Honda Accord, and I’ve never been inside it. We get full MLS access and we e-mail her what houses we want to see. We already have a lawyer who reads real estate contracts all day long in the family.
In addition, if price is such a key ingredient to agent quality - why can’t I offer $5,000 plus the 3% commission to my buyer’s agent? By that logic, that should get me a sweet agent who’ll bargain the pants off the seller and get me a house 20% below market… right?
Posted in Real Estate | 16 Comments »
We’ve been slowly moving forward with the home-buying process, but I’ve fallen behind on the updates. We are far from experts and we might have done it all wrong, but here’s how we found our buyer’s agent to represent us. We started by essentially interviewing ourselves.
Preliminary Research
First, we had to see what was out there. We went on Open Houses every single weekend for months. We looked at houses in “bad” neighborhoods, “good” neighborhoods, and everything in between. We looked at homes priced from $260,000 to $3,800,000. High-rise condos, nice townhouses, detached houses, even a shack with no water heater (but great lot). Close by and far away.
Next, we used online resources such as MLS listing websites. These days you can get a ton of information online in most metro areas, including e-mail updates of new listings. However, I am always suspicious that these sites are somewhat delayed compared to what real estate agents who pays hundreds of dollars for “real” MLS access gets. But by poking around online you can find recent sold data, tax records with previous sales history and home sketches through the city or county, and more.
By combining the real-life visits and the data available online, we started getting really good at doing our own home appraisals. By taking careful note of prices, price drops, whether the house sold or not, and for how much they sold for, we got a feel for the housing markets in different areas. We would predict whether a new listing would be sold within a week, or if it would languish for months. This allowed us to help narrow down what we cared about, and how much each separate feature might cost us.
Oh, and we asked our friends a lot of questions.
Deciding On Our Needs
This helped us figure out what we wanted from a buyer’s agent:
- Access to homes. Real estate agents will often give each other lockbox codes with no problems, but not just random people calling them up. This can get us in faster, and often with less hassle.
- Shield us from other agents. When a listing agent sees a buyer without an agent, what they see is potential client to show other houses too. They start asking more questions about what we do, what neighborhoods we’re looking at, and so on. We just want the facts on the house.
- Guidance after offer acceptance. Our parents, brothers, sisters, friends - they all have bought houses. I’ve read enough books to know what the steps are and what the terminology is, but it’s still good to have someone who’s done it 100 times before and seen all the potential hiccups.
- Patience. I would be upfront with the fact that we were going to be direct and picky buyers. We don’t want to see every house, just the select few that meet our criteria. We want to see a house, decide on a price we were willing to pay, and make an offer the same day. If they refuse, then we move on. If we don’t see a house we like for months, then that’s also fine with us. In that way, we didn’t need to be called every day or feel pressured. But if something did come up, we would be willing to move fast. We have the down payment and mortgage pre-approval ready to go.
- A second opinion and another set of eyes. I have a father-in-law that can just about build a house by himself, so that helps us a lot. But just having an experienced person point out flaws or features can be great.
Now, could we find such a person, and perhaps even get a commission rebate? I mean, we are talking about a $500,000+ home here. It turns out we could, and we did. (To be continued in Part 2.)
Posted in Real Estate | 34 Comments »
