I reached out to Eric Selk, Executive Director at Hope Now, a non-profit alliance among counselors, mortgage companies, investors, regulators, and other mortgage market participants, to gather some tips for federal employees affected by the partial shutdown who might miss a mortgage payment due to not receiving a paycheck.
Home loans frequently make up significant amounts of household debt, and reducing as much debt as possible before entering retirement can seem like a good idea. A 2013 survey found that 40% of Americans age 55 and older believe that paying off their mortgage was the smartest financial move they ever made.[i] There’s also aRead… Read more »
I am doing my best not to walk away. All efforts to fulfill my obligation have been thwarted. The system I intended to protect itself has failed me and is putting me out of my home. It takes away the job that meant to protect “accountability” and “transparency”. The $215 Billion Hole in the HousingRead… Read more »
Yuliya Demyanyk, a senior research economist at the Cleveland Fed, has a posting describing how the subprime mortgage crisis, the touchpoint for current economic woes, was not unanticipated and is much more complex than reported.
Everyone is interested in the new financial industry regualation that will be proposed and debuted this week. I intend this posting to be a primer on some of the issues which are being discussed during the week. Some of the issues being discussed on the internet include: Regulatory Arbitrage – banks and financial institutions usingRead… Read more »
I enojoyed reading this blog posting – all of the complicated, involved CDS transactions and setups were intended to reduce, or even remove, risk from loss on the underlying asset. Well, the smart guys who thought them up got caught using them on a bet against subprime performing and were schooled by others. Unfortunately, itRead… Read more »
http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/09-060.pdf Thanks to Ezra Klein’s blog on washingtonpost.com for the link – the paper is a great read (once you get past the economics) to understand exactly the mortgage back securites (MBS) market fell apart – essentially it was due to (1) bad assumptions of defalut rates, (2) poor ratings of each MBS pool byRead… Read more »
Yesterday the House passed mortgage reform legislation, HR 1728. There were a few amendments passed on the floor just before the Bill was adopted, so the final text has not been posted on www.thomas.gov yet. This appears to have very serious effects on the mortgage broker segment of the industry, as well as impacts onRead… Read more »
Interestingly, servicers who originated loans that may have violated federal or state law could use the modification process to avoid liability if they securitized the mortgage but retained the servicing rights. The author writes that this may be an unintended consequence of the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009 (H.R. 1106, passed byRead… Read more »