Homeward Bound: 6 Steps to Getting a Mortgage

Excerpt from Homeward Bound: 6 Steps to Getting a Mortgage
By CreditSesame.com

If you’re hoping to become a homeowner this year, you still have to brace yourself for a lengthy process – not least confusing of which is securing a mortgage loan. Here are six tips to get you started.

1. Get Organized
Be prepared by taking some time to organize your latest financials in advance. To name a few, start collecting:
* Pay stubs from your current employer from the most recent one-month pay period,
* A two-year history of your employment, including names, address and phone numbers,
* Two years of tax returns. (Tax returns aren’t required just from self-employed applicants these days. Many lenders require two years of tax returns for every customer.)

2. Know Your Credit Score
To get the lowest interest rate and the best possible loan pricing, lenders now require the cream of the crop of credit scores – you have to have a FICO score of at least 740, up from 720 in recent months. And if you have a score below 620, most lenders will not consider you for a loan application, even at higher interest rates.

3. Review Your Credit History
Make sure you review your credit reports before applying. If you find errors, dispute them. But keep in mind that disputes filed right before the mortgage application process will not make a good impression with lenders. Most lenders require an undisputed record of credit, and since it takes at least 60 days for credit bureaus to respond to disputes, it’s best to check up on your credit well in advance.

4. Know How Much You Can Afford
Lenders use a debt-to-income ratio (DTI) to judge your capacity to repay the loan. Your DTI ratio is the percentage of your total monthly obligations, such as existing car loans and credit cards, including the home loan you are applying for, out of your total income. The standard DTI ratio requirement today is 38%; however, lenders will accept solid borrowers who are approved, with a DTI up to 41%. Most lenders are looking for a DTI that is lower than 45%.

5. Shop Around and Ask Questions
Rates and fees can vary widely. Shop around online, talk to numerous lenders and make sure that you are searching for not only the best rates, but also the lowest fees. Some cost are negotiable, others are not.

6. Don’t Forget the Down Payment
Depending on your credit, income and the cost of the home, you will generally need a down payment of 10% to 20% of the home’s value.

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With Doubt Intensifying Around Foreclosures, New Homes With Clear Titles Look Good

With Doubt Intensifying Around Foreclosures, New Homes With Clear Titles Look Good
Source: REUTERS


Everything you need to know about the foreclosure freeze...

- Lawyers poke around and question the accuracy of legal documents from mortgage lends, putting the brakes on foreclosure proceedings.

- What's a foreclosure? You have a mortgage. You can't make the payments. The bank takes your property. You've been foreclosed.

- To foreclose on a house, a lender must prove it has a valid claim. Banks used
robo-signers" to plow through thousands of foreclosures and sign affidavits.

- What's a "robo-signer"? Not an automated machine, but a mid-level bank official who signs thousands of affidavits a month.

- Many robo-signers allegedly signed affidavits without reading them or having a notary present.

- It gets worse. Some lawyers say the people hired as "foreclosure experts" had no previous training in foreclosure law.

- The allegations prod banks to halt foreclosures while they conduct internal investigations.

- The scandal adds further uncertainty to an already toxic housing market, keeping potential buyers away.

- The revelation of fraudulent practices opens up the possibility of legal challenges on foreclosed homes. Who's going to buy a foreclosed home when its legal ownership is under dispute?

- Foreclosed properties made up nearly a quarter of home sales in Q2 of this year, nagging uncertainty among home buyers threatens to delay the housing market's recovery for at least another year.

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Staten Island's Waterfront is Getting a Makeover

Excerpt from Staten Island's Waterfront is Getting a Makeover
By Stephanie Slepian, Staten Island Advance

Imagine better connections from the St. George Ferry Terminal to North Shore restaurants and cultural attractions. An indoor horseback riding arena in Ocean Breeze Park and a children's park at Midland Beach.

Or think of taking in the views on an esplanade stretching from Clay Pit Ponds Park to Tottenville and viewing the wildlife at the future Freshkills Park. And consider increased maritime jobs, recreation and natural habitats.

It's all part of WAVES -- officially known as the Waterfront Vision and Enhancement Strategy -- a citywide initiative designed to reconnect residents and tourists to New York's 578 acres of shorelines.

The plan is expected to be announced tomorrow by Mayor Michael Blooomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who are to be joined by a host of city officials at Brooklyn Bridge Park.

A 180-page blueprint -- which will be availble at www.nyc.gov/waves -- was produced after a year of meetings with the city's 59 community boards and after vetting by the City Council, public advocate and five borough presidents. It contains plans to improve the shorelines -- called "reaches," a nautical term for a stretch of waterfront.

WAVES would advocate for construction of a new Goethals Bridge with bike, pedestrian and transit access in the Arthur Kill North Reach. The transformation of the former Fresh Kills landfill into a park is also central to the reach.

The Kill van Kull Reach includes plans for the New York Container Terminal and remediating Arlington Marsh. It supports raising the height of the Bayonne Bridge and seeks to create open space for Islanders to view Shooters Island.

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Housing Bubbles Are Few and Far Between

Excerpt from Housing Bubbles Are Few and Far Between
By Robert J. Shiller, The New York Times

What's the outlook for home prices over the next decade? It’s not easy to tell. We need to confront the basic fact that near the beginning of the 21st century, the market for homes in much of the world suddenly became more speculative than ever.

This enormous housing bubble and burst isn’t comparable to any national or international housing cycle in history. Previous bubbles have been smaller and more regional.

In the 19th century and most of the 20th, speculation in land was a powerful phenomenon. There was little speculative activity around homes, however, which were usually viewed as rapidly depreciating assets whose value was to be found almost entirely in physical buildings, not the land beneath them. Eventually, the buildings were expected to be torn down and replaced, so there was little bubble psychology for housing on any large scale. People generally didn’t think about housing as an investment.

There have been many highly localized land price bubbles in the United States over the last couple of centuries, although bubbles over large areas have been rather rare. Those with the biggest national impact were in the 19th century, when speculators found opportunities that had been created by government land sales and by shifts in land prices set off by construction of canals and railroads. Stories of fortunes in land speculation captured the imagination, and led to bubbles. (That is typically how bubbles form, by titillating the public imagination.)

Ultimately, bubbles are impossible without extreme public enthusiasm. Opinions about housing seem to change in rather trendy ways, but investor enthusiasm for housing has now been down for more than five years — a decline that started well before the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007.

Add the new policy restraints, and a new national housing bubble looks even less likely anytime soon.

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