Unfortunately we are all aware of the mortgage industry scandal and the sub-prime loan issues. I get a little upset when they try to hang the blame on independent mortgage brokers. Personally, I think it is the banking industry’s attempt to put the independent broker out of business. The broker surely didn’t write the lender’s guidelines. So, … who’s fault is it?

A single parent of 4 kids, working in the medical profession, refinanced their loving home. The financing was an adjustable rate mortgage and her payments, to start, were around $1700 per month. Later, as stated in the contract, the rate adjusted up and her new payments were about $300 more per month. There was no real problem at this point other than just a tightening of the budget. Unfortunately, a few months later she was laid off from work. Now she is about to lose her home. She claims she did not know she was in an adjustable rate mortgage and she claims she did not know how adjustable rate mortgages actually worked.

This woman is in the medical field and obviously doesn’t mop floors if she qualified for a $1700 mortgage payment. She knew she was in an ARM. There are mandatory disclosures that must be signed on all adjustable rate mortgages plus an ARM Handbook from HUD that must be given to the borrower. There is no doubt in my mind that she did understand how adjustable rate mortgages ADJUST! The only thing she didn’t count on was losing her job.

Country Wide Financial Corp. came out with some interesting data about their foreclosures. During the first 10 months of 2007 60% were of the foreclosures were caused by a loss or drop in income, 20% was due to divorce or illness. What I find really interesting is that under 2% were actually caused by the borrower’s new/adjusted rate.

Let us think about this. The Government has a plan to freeze adjustable rates on mortgages taken out between January 05 and July 07. This plan will be addressing less than 2% of the problem. The real issues are drop in or loss of income, divorce, and illness. Eighty percent of the problem is American Jobs (where have they gone?) and health care.

The lenders, not the brokers, created this problem and they should be held accountable. And, … why does the government always want to take control of things and spend our tax dollar to bail people and organizations out?

I do not believe the banks should be bailed out of this and I don’t think we should bail out the buyers who made bad choices. It is obvious to me that this was not caused by the mortgage broker. Sad will be the day for the consumer when the independent mortgage brokers are put out of business. There will be no more competition of rates and loan fees. Interest will be totally controlled by the Feds and large, for profit, banking institutions.

So much for the American Dream! Without the independent mortgage broker the average American won’t be able to afford the home their family dreams of. Any small credit glitches and a bank will either turn them down or charge them very high interest rates. The sub-prime market issues of today will pale in comparison to what these organizations will do when there is no more competition.

A red brick house and a white picket fence – long the American dream of many and in recent years more Americans have been buying their own dream in the form of their own home. Yet, for millions of us we don’t have a real good understanding of how our mortgage works completely and as a result don’t proactively manage it. There are numerous ways you can cut tens of thousands of your mortgage by taking a few simple steps during the life of your loan.

Have you ever sat down and thought about how much you could save off your mortgage if you paid a little extra every month? It doesn’t have to be much, maybe an extra $50 here, or an extra $100 there. In the early years of a mortgage most of your payment is going to pay off the interest on the loan. Every extra dollar you can put towards the principal will have a ripple effect through the entire life of the loan by reducing the total amount of interest you pay.

But wait, it gets even better! Suppose you find that you can send in a whole extra payment – you are basically now turning your fixed payment, say $600, into an investment tool. That extra payment is going to go against your loan principle and you are in effect earning whatever interest rate you are paying on your mortgage over the life of the mortgage in reduced interest charges. So if you are paying 6.75% and make an additional $600 payment you are in effect lowering the total amount you will pay on your loan by the compounded amount of that payment. If you have 30 years to go in paying off your mortgage, that extra payment will slash a total of $3,968 off your mortgage! Not a bad investment at all!

However, as good as this sounds – beware of one pitfall: pre-payment penalties. Some mortgage companies specifically charge you for paying ahead of time. Why? Because they aren’t making as much money off you as they had anticipated. When shopping for a mortgage always make sure that they do not try and penalize you for being a smart consumer and paying your loan off early!

Another way to help shave off the amount of interest you pay over time is to consider splitting your monthly mortgage payment up into biweekly payments. This amounts to making an extra payment each year since there are 26 biweekly periods in a year. Again, make sure you won’t get penalized for prepaying!

Refinancing is another great tool to use during periods where the savings will outweigh the costs associated with it. This is an important point because lower interest rates alone do not always mean you will get a better deal. Many times you have to pay fees and closing costs on the mortgage itself which can quickly eat up any savings you realize with lowering your interest – this is especially true if you have some years under your belt repaying your mortgage already.

Do the math before you make the jump to see if it makes financial sense for you to refinance at current rates.
It is easy to take a proactive approach in making sure that your mortgage becomes a tool to owning the home of your dreams instead of a burden. Making a few smart financial choices can go a long way to helping you pay your mortgage down quicker than you ever imagined.

It’s official. The math does not lie ? you should pay your mortgage WEEKLY. I have just completed all the math that you do not want to go through to find the truth.

I wanted to know the best way to pay a mortgage to save as much money as possible. Here are the conclusions that you want to take away from my studies.

Was it better to pay you mortgage weekly, bi-weekly or monthly?

-> Paying you mortgage weekly would save you 1294.12$ on a 200 000$ mortgage amortized over 25 years (rate of 5.4%). Now that’s not a ton of money but it does not cost you anything. You do not have to increase your payments at all to save. So take the saving and run with it.

-> The higher the interest rate the more you will save. If we double the interest rate, the savings are 7.08 times larger. That means that there is an exponential factor that increases, power of this strategy.

-> Paying your mortgage weekly generates 43% more savings than paying your mortgage bi-weekly.

How to increase your savings by weekly accelerated payments?

Recently many people have started to use a strategy called weekly accelerated mortgage payments. That means that they not only save money by paying weekly but they also make their payments a little bigger and save a lot of money.

To do this they simply take their monthly mortgage payment and divide it by 4. Since there is a little more than 4 weeks in a month (actually there are 4.33) they end up making 4 weekly payments more every year.

-> On a 200 000$ mortgage (rate 5.4% amortized over 25 years) the extra payment would only be 23.25$ per week.

-> You would pay out the mortgage 3.7 years earlier

-> The total savings would be 23 173.78$. Not bad! (for details visit the resource box)

Paying your mortgage weekly and accelerated is worth it! The savings on the capital you use to increase your payments is equal to having a return on investment of 7.52%. Not bad for a guaranteed return!

Saving money does not have to be complicated: pay your mortgage weekly. If you can accelerate your payments a little, you’ll save more. If paying your mortgage weekly is not possible then pay it bi-weekly. It’s not as good as paying weekly but it’s better than paying monthly!

A mortgage is a financial agreement between a lender and an individual that is hoping to purchase a home. The lender will pay for the home and the home buyer will need to pay the lender back, over the course of several years including interest. Not everyone does qualify to have a home loan like this but many do. This has become the standard way of purchasing a home in the United States. While it may not be the most affordable, as it is always more affordable to pay off the home in one payment, it is an easy process and one that can allow more people to own the home of their dreams.

What makes you qualify for a mortgage has a lot to do with the type of life you are leading financially. The lender of this home loan will want to make sure that you can actually pay for it. They will want to insure that the home will be able to be paid for today and into the future. To do this, they will look at several aspects of the potential home buyer.

The first thing that they will look at is the work history of the individual or individuals looking to purchase the home. They are looking to find out if they have employment and if they have had it over the course of their adult life. If they have steady employment, this is ideal as it shows that an individual is less of a risk of not being employed. Of course having a job shows that you have the money coming in so to pay off the home mortgage .

Next, the lender will look at the amount of money coming into the potential home buyer as opposed to what his bills are. Here, they are looking to make sure that there is enough income coming in to pay off the monthly payments that a home loan has. The debt to income ratio that they are looking for is vitally important because if there is not enough coming in, they are likely to default on the loan.

The credit score of the home owners is also very important. If you are a new homeowner, one that has never had a home before, you should insure that your credit score is high. This tells the lender of the mortgage just how responsible you are with your debts. Someone that has no credit or poor credit is more of a risk to the lender then the other guy that has good credit. If you have owned a home before, the lender of the home loan will want to look at how well you paid down your past home loans. The better that you do this, the better your qualifications for obtaining this type of loan are.

In the end, each lender will have a different set of rules as to what is okay and what is not. The good news is that you can get no obligation loan quotes easily, right on the web to allow you to see if you do qualify as well as how much of a loan you qualify for. A mortgage is a serious commitment that only the people that can afford it should take on.

Remortgage in simple terms means the subsequent mortgage of an asset to get a further loan, or when the asset changes hands as a collateral to get a further loan it can be termed as remortgage. This mainly takes place when a borrower is dissatisfied with the mortgager or has difficulty in making the payments. Remortgage is done to meet cash needs, to reduce costs of interest, to decrease the amount of monthly installments, to reduce the period of the loans , to meet expenses which are unforeseen and sudden. There may be times when a person has to get into problem remortgage. People who have had a bad credit history may find difficulty in getting a remortgage and problem remortgage is just the solution for them. It aims and targets the people who have had a past of being insolvent or who have earlier missed their payments, have been defaulters in one way or the other. In a problem remortage one can have the option to get a loan both in the fixed and variable interest rates. In a fixed interest rate plan one pays the same amount of installment and any change in the market interests rates do not affect the amount to be paid by the borrower. Variable interest rates affect the amount to be paid in installments as and when the interest rates vary. With a problem remortgage, one can aim at getting a debt consolidation, pay for the renovation of a home, buy a brand new car, meet educational expenses or pay the expenses for any other need or want.

With a problem remortagage the person in default gets a chance to remortgage his asset and thereby get more finance to meet his needs and expenses. If the borrower is lucky, he may get a problem remortgage loan at even lower rates than his first mortgage. There are people who have scattered and many debts here and there and find it difficult to keep track of payments and hence become defaulters. Problem remortgage helps these people by allowing them to consolidate their debts at one place and leave the hassle of making different payments behind. Problem remortgage not only helps a person to reduce the amount of his monthly payments but also increase the period of his loan.

If a bad credit history is bothering a person, problem remortgage is the right solution. It gives the borrower a chance to repair his credit history. Once a loan is taken through a problem remortgage the borrower can make his monthly installments on time and get rid of the bad credit rating. It is not at all difficult to find a lender who can offer problem remortgage. There are several banks and financial institutions that specialize or have a scheme of problem remortgage. These schemes can also be tailor made to suit the needs of the borrower. One can visit these institutions or just sit and get all the information through the internet at the click of some keys. So practically, one is just a click away from getting a problem remortgage. There are websites which not only give you deals but also compare more than hundred deals of different lenders at the same time. This helps the borrower to make a comparative study and choose the best of problem remortgage. The processing of the problem remortage is easy and thus getting a loan does not take much time.

For all the people who have in trapped in the vicious circle of debts and loans, problem remortgage is the best and ideal solution. It is easy to get an eases a lot of burden off the shoulders of the borrower and at the same time improve his credit ratings. With a problem remortgage one can start fresh and make all that in life that one had ever dreamt of but found it difficult to realize his dreams. To know more about problem remortgage and any other financial issue, one can visit