Entries Tagged 'United States' ↓

Today the Obama administration started the previously announced mortgage rescue plan.  I wrote a detailed summary of the plan on Wise Bread.  Simply put, I think it is a pretty ridiculous plan.  The portion for responsible homeowners to refinance was already in place.  I can prove this because I got approved for a Fannie Mae streamline refinance in January before the plan was even announced and there was no appraisal at all on the refinance which means that they did not care about the loan to value ratio.  The new stuff is all in the incentives for modifying loans for people who cannot pay their obligations. So basically if you have good credit and you have been paying on time you are just stuck with higher tax bills to fund the program for people who has not been filling their obligations.  Great deal.

Anyway, I was going to write a pretty long rant about the new gargantuan Obama budget, but this article at American Spectator called Obama’s Fantasy Budget by Peter Ferrara  said a lot of the things I wanted to say.  Here are some of the main points in the article that  I was going to write about:

• Obama is raising the budget from $3 trillion in 2008 to $4 trillion in 2009.  This is a 25% increase.
• Obama is growing the national debt by $2.7 trillion this year.  This is a growth of 27% in one year over the collective debt of the United States for the past 200+ years.
• The deficit for this year is the largest ever at $1.75 trillion, which is more than 12% of GDP.
• Obama pulls out a nebulous $2 trillion budget cut over 10 years for winding down the wars, but this is barely half of his first year’s budget.
• Obama is keeping his promise of raising taxes for high earners, and also trying to limit the deductions they can take.  The money will be used to give refunds beyond what some tax payers pay.  Basically, a good amount of people could be paying no taxes and receiving extra tax refunds.
• Increased taxes on energy companies will creep into consumer energy costs.

The funny thing is that Obama said that he is going to cut the deficit in half in four years.  I wonder if he means he will cut the deficit he creates.  The bottom line is, a bigger budget is absolutely not a better budget.  It is incredibly difficult to create a budget for an entire national government, but the sheer size of the government allows the president to find more areas to cut.   The problem is that I do not think a small and efficient government aligns with the Obama administration’s agenda.

Finally, all of this money is not free.  It will come from the backs of Americans in one form or another.  Even the poorest who will get tax rebates will be affected in some way either through higher prices or less employment due to higher business taxes.  The deficit also indicates that the government cannot collect enough tax revenue, so don’t expect the tax hikes to stop at those who earn over $250,000 a year.

Share This

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.

Share This

Before I begin, I will flat out admit that  Idiocracy is a pretty stupid film overall.  The premise of the movie was that imbeciles were procreating at a faster rate than highly educated people so after 500 years the whole earth was filled with idiots.  They created giant piles of trash and watered their crops with energy drinks.  It was a dumb movie, and my husband said he felt stupider after watching it.

The first time I got reminded of Idiocracy was when we watched Wall-E in the theatre.  These two movies both had giant piles of trash and also a very similar ending. The main difference was that Wall-E’s protagonists were cute little robots.  After watching that movie my husband said, “Idiocracy ruined Wall-E for me”.

This week I remembered the story of Idiocracy again after reading about Nadya Suleman.  Nadya Suleman is the mother of the now famous octuplets.  Apparently she now has a total of 14 kids.  Three of her older six kids are disabled so she’s receiving food stamps and money for them, and she funded her invitro treatments with her disability payments.  She is unemployed and now Kaiser is demanding money from MediCal to pay for the care of her octuplets.

I totally believe that everyone should be able to have as many kids as they want, but people need to understand that kids are huge responsibilities financially, physically, and emotionally.  An understanding these of responsibilities is what prevents a lot of folks from having a lot of kids, and this was illustrated in the movie Idiocracy.

So what’s my point?  I actually do not believe that book smarts is totally hereditary so I think it is possible that parents that are considered to be “dumb” can have very successful children. Basically, I do not believe that the world in Idiocracy would actually become a reality.  However, I am pretty annoyed by people who are perpetually unemployed and have  kids just to milk the system and collect welfare checks or discounted housing.   If you intend to provide for the kids you have and find a way to do it then there is nothing wrong with having tons of kids.  In fact, I admire the Duggar family of Arkansas a lot for what they are doing with their brood of 18.

With that said, if Nadya Suleman gets a reality show I think I would puke, because that would be true idiocracy.

Share This

Today the new Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner outlined a plan to “restore stability to our financial system”. The speech and its contents are on a new website at FinancialStability.gov.  I seriously thought that it was a joke, and here is why.

First of all, the cost of the plan is up to $2 trillion.  To borrow a quote  from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, “if you started the day Jesus Christ was born and spent $1 million every day since then, you still wouldn’t have spent $1 trillion.”  Senator McConnell was speaking about the huge bloated stimulus bill, and now Geithner proposes a plan that costs 2 to 3 times of that monstrosity.  I have no idea how this is possible.

Second, the new administration is heralding Geithner’s plan as a completely new idea.  If you drill down into the fact sheet and read what he plans to do, then you will see that it is not so different from Paulson’s rhetoric of buying up bad bank assets.  They did add initiatives to drive more consumer and business lending, but the method is the same as before.  Basically, they want to provide more capital to the banks. After billions of dollars already injected into the nations largest banks, they are still doing business as usual and actually making more profit than ever since they are borrowing at the lowest costs in decades and lending out at similar rates as before.  The banks are doing just fine, and I doubt that giving them more money will compel them to lend at better terms to consumers.  They will just profit further because that is the goal of a bank.

Finally, there is more language about preventing “avoidable foreclosures”.  I am not sure if Geithner read the old news that modifying mortgages for people who cannot pay just does not work.  One of the biggest problems facing the entire country right now is the rising unemployment rate, and that is fueling more foreclosures.  There is no point in trying to prevent these foreclosures through loan modification because what people need are sources of income.

Obviously,  I am not the only one who has no confidence in this plan because the stock market took a huge dip today.  Perhaps the Treasury should change their website’s name from FinancialStability.gov to FinancialDisaster.gov because that would at least instill some panic into people’s hearts just like how Obama is campaigning for the stimulus bill by using the “politics of fear“.

Share This

Recently I read that Senate Republicans are proposing an amendment to the Obama stimulus plan which calls for 4% mortgage rates for all credit worthy borrowers who want to refinance. I think this could potentially be a true stimulus to the economy, and here is why.

First of all, I think very few people have a 4% fixed mortgage right now. That rate is pretty much unheard of since mortgage products were invented. This means that a lot of people stand to save money month over month. For a person who has a 6% rate, a refinance to 4% means that they would save 33% on their mortgage. For a typical mortgage in California consumers can save anywhere from $200 to $500 a month, and that is a much better boost than a one time $500 or $600 tax rebate. That extra money can go into savings or be spent on other things. Since prices have come down on many items in this economy, it is likely consumers will spend their money if they have it.

Second, banks can definitely afford to lend out at 4% because the government already cut the interbanking lending rates drastically. In fact, they are pulling in more profits than ever even when they lend more than 5%. Historically, the difference between the 30 year mortgage rate and the 10 year treasury rate is 1.7 percent. Now it is around 3.3%, so banks can afford to cut the rate and still be profitable. It is pretty unfair that these banks are getting all of the benefits of the current mess even though they created, and perhaps they should do their part in helping consumers now.

Finally I like the plan because it rewards responsibility. If people with good credit can refinance at the low rates then it encourages good personal finance behavior. Instead of letting all the bailouts go to those who spent too much too fast, maybe it is time to help those who are working hard and being accountable to their own debts.  The economy can be really stimulated if people have trust in the financial system again and start investing and spending, and I think this would be a good start.

Share This