How Will the Fed’s Increase of Interest Rates Affect You?

No one will know until we all know, but most analysts agree and investors are betting that the “Feds” – the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank – will raise interest rates when they meet on December 15th and 16th. How will this impact you? First, let’s talk about what interest rates they...

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Interest Rates Remain Steady, Poised to Drop

On November 7th I wrote that interest rates had jumped up at the end of the first week of November, and that they would probably settle back down slowly. That is indeed what has happened. There is movement every day, but all this month the movement in interest rates (no matter which measurement you use)...

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Will 2016 Bring a Housing Bubble?

Most of us still remember the housing crash of 2008 – vividly. Housing prices, driven by ever-more-creative financing and frenzied demand skyrocketed higher and higher in a positive feedback loop that everyone knew would crash one day, but few knew where to jump off. Today’s market feels “frothy” (as Alan Greenspan would say) like the...

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$124 mm in Mortgage Settlement Money Disappears in Texas

When the “too big to fail” banks were caught red-handed cheating consumers out of billions through intentionally bad underwriting, forging documents, foreclosing while telling consumers they were in the process of modifying their mortgages and robo-signing (among other malfeasance) the CFPB fined them billions of dollars collectively. Most of the mortgage settlement money was earmarked...

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Interest Rates Jump – What’s Next?

A surprisingly strong jobs report on Friday got a lot of media attention for pushing interest rates up, and interest rates did indeed take a bit of a jump up on Friday. But if you take a look at the chart below you’ll see they’ve actually been rising sharply for two weeks. We can ask...

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Is the Mortgage Broker Taking Back the Business?

I have always believed that the mortgage broker is the best thing that ever happened to mortgage consumers. If a consumer chooses to use a mortgage broker then they have access to dozens of lenders who compete for their business with a combination of price, speed and customer service. If a consumer chooses to work...

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