Entries Tagged 'Loans' ↓

On Friday the Federal Housing Administration Commissioner David Stevens admitted that the agency’s reserve funds has sunken below the legally mandated level of 2% of its insured loans.  However, the commissioner also said that the 75 year old agency will not need a taxpayer bailout. Is this remotely believable?   Lets look at some datapoints.

First of all, the FHA doesn’t make loans.  It simply insures lenders against losses on defaults.  This means that if a loan defaults completely, then the FHA is on the hook to make the lender whole.  The money it uses comes from mortgage insurance premiums that borrowers pay.  The current rate is 1.75% of the loan amount upfront, and some additional monthly insurance on 30 year loans.  The monthly mortgage insurance goes away when the borrower gains enough equity.  When you add it all together the premium is less than 3% of the loan.  The  borrowers will need a minimum downpayment of only 3.5%, and they can borrow up to $729k in high cost areas.  The problem with this whole scheme is that the lenders do not care if the FHA loses money because they will be compensated if things go wrong.  Since private insurers, Fannie, and Freddie tightened up their lending guidelines, the new subprime loans are practically all going to the FHA.  This has pushed the  mortgage loan  market share of FHA loans   from 2.7% in 2006 to 23% in the second quarter of 2009.

Basically, the FHA has taken on a vast expansion, and with that expansion it has taken on a lot more risk.  The 90+ late and foreclosure rate of FHA loans is now at 7.8% according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, and this is only expected to rise since those who take out FHA loans generally have very little downpayment, and their average credit scores are lower than the prime borrowers. Unemployment has not stopped rising and the economy isn’t totally recovered.    The FHA currently  insures about 5.2 million according to its website, and 7.8% means  that about 405,000 of these loans are practically lost.  Additionally, there are another 400 to 500k borrowers that have missed at least one payment.  Since the value of the FHA reserve funds are going to fall below 2% of the value of the insured loans, it is hard to imagine how the agency would cover all the losses when they come due unless all the loans that defaulted have balances much much lower than  the average loan.  It is pretty simple math when you think about it.

I really do not see how the FHA could build up its reserve fund in two to three years when the foreclosure rate of the loans it is insuring is not exactly decreasing.  The FHA is insuring many more loans than before, but those new loans are also defaulting and draining the reserve funds.  You have to remember that the insurance premium is very small, so in many instances the FHA is using the premiums from 20 to 30 homes to repay the lender for one default.  That is only sustainable if the default rate is very small, but a 30 day late rate of 17% is not exactly encouraging.

Anyway, the FHA does not expect to increase its insurance premium rates or downpayment limits, but it is requiring audits of the lenders that send loans to the FHA to prevent fraud.  I would have thought that those audits were already happening, but I guess not.  If the FHA really wants to decrease the amount of its defaults it would need to increase its downpayment limits so that people have more equity in their homes, but I don’t really see that happening.  Eventually this agency is going to need a bailout.  They may not call it a bailout, but I think it is pretty much inevitable unless the FHA changes course drastically.

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Last October my husband and I spent a lot of time and money to purchase my hubby’s childhood home in Southern California from  his parents.  Everything went through at the moment we stepped on a plane for China.  So far it is going well.  Our entire family spent winter break at the house for over two weeks and now we have a wonderful family taking care of the home and we can visit whenever we want.  Since October, mortgage rates have dropped significantly so I was shopping around for a refinance.  Today we will be doing the signing with the same lender we are with now for a Fannie Mae to Fannie Mae streamline loan.  Our interest rate is going from 5.875% to 4.875% and we will be saving over $200 a month on interest.

Personally, I did not know that there was an option of the Fannie Mae to Fannie Mae streamline loan, but I talked to my lender in January about refinancing and they said that we qualify for a streamline loan  Basically, there is no need for a new appraisal and  broker fees were waived since we are just doing the refinance with  the same bank.  Some fees cannot be avoided, such as a new title search and title insurance.  They also ran a new credit check, but the process was very easy overall since they had pretty much all of our information.

After running a bunch of calculations on the costs I determined that it was still worth it to refinance because we would be saving over $80,000 on interest over the lifetime of the loan with the 1% difference in the rate.  We will recover our costs in a little less than 2 years and since we intend to keep the home for a long time it is not a bad deal.

Also, since we only paid our old loan for 3 months, we are not really stretching out the loan by all that much.  Now if we apply the extra money we are saving towards the principal every month, we will pay off the loan six years early so I consider this a good move for us.

I am not sure if interest rates will move even lower, but 4.875% is a rate I am willing to stick with for a while and if it really goes down to 3.5 I could just refinance again.  If you are interested in finding out about the Fannie Mae to Fannie Mae streamline refinance you can check out this product matrix at Fannie Mae.

The basic requirements are these:

1. Your loan must be originally fully documented and underwritten by Fannie Mae guidelines.  It has to  be held by Fannie Mae right now.

2. You cannot have late payments within the 30 days you are applying

3.  You have to submit to a credit check, and your credit score needs to be 720 – 740 if your loan is more than 90% of the value, and 660 – 680 if your loan is less than 75% of the value.  Basically, your credit score has to be fairly good.

There are also a bunch of variations on the requirements based on the type of property and loan to value calculations that you have to read the Product Matrix to figure out.  I think this could be helpful to people who have homes that lost value dramatically because they really do not do an appraisal.  I would have been okay with an appraisal since we just bought the home 3 months ago and prices haven’t slid 20% in 3 months, but I know a lot of people who bought in 2006 or 2007 who have lost 20% to 30% and can’t take advantage of the great rates now.  My suggestion is to ask your lender if you qualify for a streamline, and you may be able to save thousands of dollars.

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When I left for vacation I mentioned that we still haven’t closed on the house, yet.  Well, on the day we left I got a call right before the plane was about to take off that said that our money was received and everything was fine.  So now we are officially homedebtors.

Right now my in-laws are still living in the home and we will be visiting for the holidays and also my sister-in-law’s upcoming wedding.  My in-laws won’t leave until next year and we are working on finding a caretaker who could keep the home occupied for at least a year.  The caretaker will be responsible for the maintenance and any utilities they use.  There are a few families that know my in-laws who are interested right now since it would be a good deal for them, but we are still going to have a formal application process to screen them. Since my in-laws may return after a year abroad the caretaker is just temporary.

We did not buy this home as owner-occupied/primary residence since we don’t intend to move down there for quite a while, and that raises a few issues.  First of all, our homeowner’s insurance is simply Dwelling Fire, which means that nothing inside the home is protected.  This is not a big deal since we are not living there.  Second, if we do sell the home in the future we will have to pay capital gains taxes.  In the past people could avoid this by moving into the home for two years, but the laws have changed so that starting from 2009 this isn’t the case anymore.

Overall, the situation isn’t that bad because we have 30% equity in the home right now based on a recent appraisal and the mortgage is 15% of our gross income.  Since we already itemize on our taxes we can claim the mortgage interest deduction, and that cuts down the mortgage a bit more.  We plan to keep the home for a very long time and possibly pass it onto our kids so I’m not too worried about the value going down a bit more.  We are also planning to pay off the mortgage in 13 years instead of 30 by adding extra principal onto every payment, so  we now have 155 more payments to go.

There is a possibility that we will move down there in a few years if the hubby gets the job he wants down there, and if that’s the case then we would have a nice house to live in.

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I am leaving San Mateo for China first thing in the morning tomorrow.  Sorry for the lack of updates but these couple weeks have been insanely busy for me.  We actually still haven’t completely closed on the house because of a bunch of mix ups and confusion.  Hopefully it will be done tomorrow, but I won’t be here to see it.  That sounds pretty precarious and believe me, I have been pulling out my hair for about two days.  I have also been trying to tie up loose ends at work and it has been two extremely chaotic weeks.

I am so glad that I will be leaving on a jetplane tomorrow because I just need to get away from this crazy country for a while and escape to another crazy country.   We will be watching the presidential election through the filter of CCTV.  The hubby already voted early on Saturday, so he is all set.

I will be back early morning of November 14th, but there will be an excellent guest post by The Wandering Tax Pro in a couple days.   Stay tuned!

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The New York Times recently published an interactive calculator that allows you to compare your debt situation to a group of more than 360 American families that were surveyed in 2004. After playing with it for a little bit, it was pretty clear that this survey indicates that those with more income are more likely to have debt. This led to me to ask, why is that those with more means seem to borrow more?

The calculator allows you to input your mortgage debt, credit card debt, automobile debt, and educational debt.  Then you can choose your income and age group on the bottom and it tells you how many percent of the families they surveyed are like you. So I put in $0 and less than 35 year old.  In my age bracket, 39% of families making less than $20,000 per year had no debt, and only 3% of families making more than $150,000 per year had no debt.  This is a very stark difference.  When I changed the age bracket to all age groups, 47% of families making under $20,000 had no debt while only 14% of families making more than $150,000 had no debt. That is still a very big difference.

I noticed that regardless of income, most of the debt of these families came in the form of mortgage. The average amount of mortgage debt goes up as you scroll up in income. This makes sense because more income allows people to qualify for larger mortgages.  Higher income families also tend to live in areas with high costs of living so housing is more expensive to begin with. Some would argue that mortgage is a type of “good” debt because it allows people to have a piece of real estate after it is paid off, but that alone  does not change the fact that it is a debt.

In all the other categories of debt, higher income families still owed more than lower income families on average.  The average automobile debt of families making over $150k  is nearly 9 times the automobile debt of a family making less than $20k.  All of this just shows that those with higher income spends much more on the same goods and services.

Personally I have lived in both ends of the income spectrum presented in this survey.  When we just moved to America we were living on one graduate stipend.  All three of us lived on less than $1000 a month and we watched our expenses day to day.  Nothing was bought without a coupon, and the damaged foods section is where we shopped first. When my family was at that income level, frugality was necessary for survival  and  there is no room for debt because one credit card interest charge could mean a week’s worth of groceries.

Later, my parents graduated and we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area.  They both had well paying jobs after a few years, and they took on a mortgage. A big change I noticed is that we no longer cut out every coupon we found for food and we ate out much more.  It was much easier to spend money because we had more income than before.  The rationale was that coupons were no longer worth the time and effort to redeem, and paying for good food was great because we can’t cook like that anyway. Being frugal is just harder when you have the means to spend your money and justify it later as only 0.25% of your salary.

Though, having said this, I would like to clarify that my family was never that extravagant and got in any debt other than their mortgages. Also, I think it would more interesting if the NY Times reported the amount of assets these families had and see if these families could cover the amount of the debt they have.  If the higher income families had enough assets to make their net worths positive, then they are not too badly off.  If they had the most debt and least assets, then they are really in trouble.

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