Finances

The popularity of stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s show how many homeowners are jumping on the home improvement bandwagon. Maybe you’re thinking of redoing part of your house as well. Perhaps you want the kitchen of your dreams or an extra bathroom. You know you’ll have to take out a loan to finance the project, but if you’re just in the beginning stages of the planning, you may not know exactly how to go about it. Whether you’re refinancing or taking out a home-equity loan, here’s some information on what your bank needs:

As with any loan, your bank will want to review your financial history before approving you for a home-equity loan. While different banks will have different loan criteria, there are a few things you can expect each institution to require:

-Your address and how long you’ve lived there
-Your employment history and current employer
-Your annual income and assets
-Your total debt and monthly obligations

For home-equity loans, the bank will also need information on your house such as its age and current property value. Save time by bringing the current tax assessment for your property with you. For smaller loans (usually $2000 or less), this may be enough information to indicate the home’s market value to the bank’s satisfaction. However, for larger loans, banks will require professional appraisals. Home appraisals typically cost $200-$300.

Before you go looking at houses, you’ll need to find a real estate agent. Hiring a real estate agent takes a little bit of time to do. You’re making one of the most important financial decisions in your life and you want to make sure you hire the right person.

You can get recommendations for agents from family members, friends and co-workers you trust who have used that agent themselves in buying a home. You can also check the internet, newspaper listings, and “Homes for Sale” publications.

The best type of agent to look for are the ones who work in real estate full-time. Sometimes, the part-time agents may not devote enough time towards finding a home for you. You want agents who do this for a living full-time and will make sure that your housing needs are met. Also, because there is such a high turnover among real estate agents, you want to find several that have been doing this for at least the past couple of years.

Try to find agents that are licensed and have the Graduate, REALTORS® Institute series (GRI) accreditation from the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR). Agents who have the GRI will usually have it printed on their letterhead or business cards. If not, just ask if they have this particular accreditation.

Buying your first house is always a difficult time. There are so many important decisions to make, and problems to be solved, which combine to make it one of the most stressful events that will occur in most people’s lives.

Some of the most obvious problems include the need to:

* find a suitable house to purchase

* plough through complicated financial information

* choose an appropriate mortgage that will cover the cost of the house and is within your own strict budgets

* save up enough money (usually whilst still renting another property) to cover a mortgage deposit

* deal with unfamiliar legal fees, surveys and other costs

* make a realistic offer on your prospective new home

* waiting to see if the offer is accepted

* complete the purchase

* move and get settled in the new house, with whatever decorating/rebuilding is required

Given these factors, it is perhaps not surprising that first-time buyers can be the first to get spooked by changes in the housing market.

You’re selling your home and are looking to relocate to the Carolinas. While researching homes in your new community you discover that you do not know of any mortgage lenders in the area. Your realtor is pressuring you for some answers. The solution? You turn to the internet and discover Carolina mortgage loans are available right online.

The internet provides solutions to many of life’s problems. If you need information, you can simply log in, enter some words in the Google search box and in a nanosecond be served up with quality results.

This especially holds true if you are in need of finding a mortgage. For example, typing “Carolina Mortgage Loans” into the search bar will give you over 6,000 results. Like most people you will only look at the first few pages or click on some ads to find answers.

Of course, you may need to narrow the search down further if you are looking for a home in North Carolina, not South Carolina. Still, you will have 5,000 quality results to look at. A bit much, right? Narrow your search further and enter “Garner” the city you will live in and 273 result are served. Now that is a bit more manageable, right?

As loan officers, the word "lead" is by far one of the most common words we use during the day, it is the topic of many of our conversations, it is praised and cursed, it is good and it is bad, it is loved and it is hated, on bad days it is hard to find, and on good days it falls right into our lap.

The lead is a specter that haunts us constantly, we can’t get enough of them, no mater how many or how little we have, we are constantly searching for more.

In a perfect world, a lead would be waiting for us every morning on our desk placed there by the lead fairy, along with a complimentary cup of coffee and a morning paper. With a waive of her magic wand she would ensure that every lead would turn into a deal and we would end up with a 100% closure ratio. Unfortunately this is not the case.

As a loan officer starting out in this industry, I came to work on my first day and expected the leads to just come out of no where, as you can expect, nothing happened. On the second day, I came to work, and again I expected the leads to just start coming out of no where. As you can imagine, nothing happened.

There are currently more than 50 million home mortgages in the United States today. So why aren’t more homeowners taking advantage of the highest yielding lowest risk, tax-free financial strategy available today?

Let me ask you.

Where can you…….

? Forego only $3.35 in tax savings (three dollars and 35 cents)

? Invest $350 over the course of 12 months ( three hundred and fifty dollars)

? Get a return of $3,300! (That’s Three thousand three hundred dollars)

$3300 for $353.35?

It’s certainly not the stock market, pork bellies or even currency trading. These vehicles are all highly leveraged high risk speculations in which the vast majority of the participants lose money, Lots of money.

So what is this low risk high return tax-free strategy?

Well, it’s right in front of your nose. In fact this is so close to home that you may have never even realized the life altering benefits you can achieve.

It’s called The Bankers Secret otherwise known as equity acceleration or mortgage principal pre-payment

According to the Council of Mortgage Lenders, first-time buyers are the most susceptible group of homeowners to debt, as they are more likely to have higher loan-to-value ratios and commit a higher proportion of their income to mortgage repayments. Despite their susceptibility to debt, there is evidence which indicates that insurance take-up and employee benefits provide recent first-time buyers with a safer foundation than the general population of mortgage borrowers.

The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) has become increasingly concerned about the ability of current and future home-buyers to pay back mortgages in the event of changing circumstances. Over the past five years, the CML and its partners within the Sustainable Home-ownership Initiative, have sought to improve this issue. Contributing factors to the problem include increasing personal debt levels and a less certain economic environment. This has provoked concern about the sustainability of home-ownership and consumer understanding of financial products, ensuring that the issue of mortgage risk is at the top of the agenda for the UK Government, industry regulators and public as a whole.

Current economic scene has hinted towards a fall in the Bank of England base rate from a three and a half year high of 4.75%. 78% of the property investors are contemplating refinancing their home loans. Are you thinking the same? This is the appropriate time for remortgage and moving to competitive interest rates. Remortgage is indeed a very cost effective option.

A fall in the interest rates is a constant driving force in favour of remortgage. Remortgage implies the transfer of mortgage from current lender to new lender with low interest rates and better loan repayment facilities. The rising popularity of remortgage has concrete backing. Remortgage can save upto £100 to £200 on monthly payments. And that is just one of the good things.

Remortgage should rest on some serious thought process for it is a very significant decision. Like mortgage, remortgage entails your home and similarly puts it at risk incases of non-repayment. Remortgage can be applied with your current lender but it almost always necessitates lender change. You can ask your current lender if he is willing to modify policy and offer better and more suitable remortgage plan. In case he complies with your requirements, stick with him. Otherwise there is no scarcity of loan lenders offering remortgage.

You can maximize your savings by shopping for a lender that can provide you with a combination loan. The combination loan starts as a construction loan. During this phase, your lender cuts checks to your builder and their subcontractors as they successfully reach significant steps in the building process. Once your home nears completion, your lender activates a traditional mortgage.

The new loan pays off your construction loan and rolls the remainder into the assessed value of the new property. The first way a combination loan can save you money is by eliminating a second set of closing costs. By handling both deals simultaneously, you save yourself and your lenders considerable time and money, savings that lenders are happy to pass along in the form of preferred rates.

Many banks let the commercial side of their business handle construction loans, while the consumer division oversees the mortgages. Therefore, the best place for you to start your hunt for the best deal is with the branch manager of the banks with offices in your area. Unlike traditional mortgages that can be handled over the phone or the Internet, construction loans require significant local oversight.

You should say goodbye to PMI. You may not notice it in the crush of your monthly mortgage statement, but many Americans pay for a line item called PMI. PMI stands for “personal mortgage insurance,” and lenders impose it on customers who have less than twenty percent equity in their homes.

If you took advantage of a low-money-down offer, the PMI will protect the bank if you go bankrupt. Once your equity has risen above twenty percent, call your lender to cancel the PMI - you no longer need it. You should eliminate force place insurance.

If you ever happen to let your homeowner’s insurance lapse, your mortgage lender can legally protect their assets by imposing a force-place insurance policy on your account. A force-place insurance policy doesn’t cover the loss of your belongings in case of fire or theft. And you may have to pay about four times as much per month for force-place insurance than you would for the cheapest homeowner’s policy. Keep your homeowner’s insurance current, and notify your lender immediately if you see a line item for force-place insurance on your bill.