banktime.com

Most consumers know by now that mortgage rates are approaching all-time lows. With the national average for a thirty-year, fixed-rate mortgage hanging just under four and a half percent, there has never been a better time to buy a new home – or to refinance your home loan on a property your already own. It’s ironic that, when so many people are terrified of losing their homes to foreclosure, it’s easier than ever for consumers to afford their own residences. With rates so low, many consumers are finding that their closing costs are either nonexistent or ridiculously low. In terms of refinancing, the experts say that if you stand to save more than a quarter point, it is worth giving it a try.

In exchange for charging lower fees for reverse mortgages, homeowners seeking one of these “Saver” loans would be eligible to cash in ten to eighteen percent less equity on their homes. This is intended to keep the FHA from losing money the way it has been doing on current reverse mortgages.

There’s a tremendous tendency among homeowners to think that every penny you sink into your home is an improvement that will reap you corresponding equity if and when it ever comes time to sell the property. Too bad that things don’t at all actually work that way. Statistics show that, for every thousand dollars that homeowners spend making their homes “better,” they can only expect to recoup around six hundred dollars. And that’s in best case scenarios.

It’s more bad news for home prices in the state of Ohio, an area of the country hit especially hard by the housing collapse and the continued toils of the Great Recession. A new report from Cleveland showed home prices in the northeastern part of the state taking a veritable nose-dive, right in line with overall U.S. home values that were at a ten-year low. From coast to coast, individual housing markets are painting a very clear picture of just how bad off the real estate situation is.

The bad economy has made all sorts of interesting changes to the American lifestyle. We know some of the biggies – fewer jobs, smaller paychecks, fewer luxuries, the rise of “frugalista” culture, et cetera. Over the weekend, it seems that we discovered yet another interesting effect of the Great Recession. The American birthrate has fallen for the second year in a row. It seems that money troubles have given some U.S. families pause when it comes to starting their families or expanding existing ones.

Almost everyone knows that you can refinance your home mortgage to save some cash on your monthly payments when rates fall (as, for many people, they have at present), but were you aware that you can also refinance your auto loan? Auto loan interest rates are also very low at the moment, even though it tends to be the cost of mortgages that gets all the attention.

According to the U.S. Treasury, two billion dollars from the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) will be sent to the seventeen states “hardest hit” by the real estate crisis. The funds are meant to jump-start programs aimed at unemployed homeowners who are having trouble paying their mortgages. The so-called Hardest Hit Fund was established by President Obama this past winter to support sinking homeowners in those areas of the country plagued by the worst housing and job markets, in light of the fact that most foreclosures taking place these days are being executed on middle-class – read: responsible – homeowners who are troubled because of joblessness. The money is drawn from the fifty billion dollars that Congress approved to spend on the Making Homes Affordable program’s mortgage modification section.

The president is hard at work thinking up ways to overhaul his administration’s tackling of the foreclosure crisis, say experts. Obama is looking to set requirements obliging lenders to lower or eliminate mortgage payments for those homeowners who have lost their jobs. Under the proposal currently being considered, banks would be required to cut mortgage payments to where they accounted for no more than thirty-one percent of the borrower’s income, which is usually equivalent to the amount of unemployment insurance that they qualify for receiving, for anywhere from three to six months.

Mortgage rates are at historic lows, and there is evidence that they will continue to fall in weeks to come. Last week, the national average mortgage rate bottomed out at 4.44%, according to Freddie Mac. Usually in times like these, prospective homeowners and those who already have mortgages would be lined up in snaking queues around the block to attain mortgages and refinancing to get better payments.

Ethics and morality have very little place in real estate. That old axiom had never been truer than in this day and age. I recently read an article in the Denver Post about “buy and bail” homeowners – those who purchase a home when they already own one that is upside-down on equity and considered to be a poor investment – and then ditch the first home. The new home is purchased before the conniving homeowners’ credit scores are trashed by the strategic foreclosure that they plan on executing.