HUD recently announced changes in the mortgage insurance premiums that borrowers using FHA financing will be charged; in response to industry complaints about the short time frame provided for implementing those changes, HUD has agreed to postpone that implementation by one month. Read the rest of this entry »

FHA issued a notice yesterday that it will, as expected, make some fairly substantial changes to the mortgage insurance premiums that it charges to FHA borrowers. Read the rest of this entry »

I was recently quoted in the Washington Examiner in an article about the tax credit for military, diplomatic, and intelligence personnel; as is often the case with those sorts of articles, though, space constraints meant that a lot of the details that I gave to the reporter ended up not being published, so I thought I would give people the fuller story here. Read the rest of this entry »

Congress has passed the Homebuyer Improvement and Assistance Act of 2010, which extends the deadline by which certain buyers need to close on their purchases of homes in order to be eligible for up to $8000 in tax credits. Read the rest of this entry »

Buyers of homes in Special Flood Hazard Areas will probably be unable to close on their purchases for the next few weeks due to the failure of Congress to reauthorize the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Read the rest of this entry »

FHA has announced a program whereby homeowners with FHA mortgages who have been affected by recent issues with defective drywall can temporarily suspend or reduce payments on their mortgage in order to give them the additional cashflow that they might need to deal with those drywall issues. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a quick overview of current mortgage rates/payments for some typical scenarios that we have run for consumers recently. Read the rest of this entry »

In testimony before Congress today, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan announced plans to reduce the risk that FHA is exposed to in its loan insurance operations; these plans, however, will make FHA loans much less appealing to many borrowers, and may slow down the nascent recovery in the housing market. Read the rest of this entry »

FHA has issued their official loan amount limits for 2010. As previously announced, the overall cap was left at $729,750, but individual areas faced the possibility of having their limits set below that cap; with the new announcement, many of those higher-cost areas (including DC) can rest easy knowing that their local limits will not be decreasing. Read the rest of this entry »

Contact information and tips to help consumers monitor their credit reports and correct inaccurate information on those reports (for free). Read the rest of this entry »