Category Archives: Mortgage Foreclosure
Zombie Mortgages Are as Scary as They Sound
Mortgage foreclosure is an ordeal. The bank could kick you out of your house in an instant, but instead they drag the process out for months, with final notices, additional notices beyond the final ones, a foreclosure case, and court order, and then the auction of your house, like a cat toying with a… Read More »
How to Get Out of a Mortgage Loan That You Can’t Pay
Mortgage foreclosure is not a quick process, and that makes it even more painful. Much of the advice that you can find online is about how to stay in your house until the bitter end, trying to buy time until the bank, which now legally owns the house, can evict you. You might also… Read More »
Who’s Afraid of Reverse Mortgages?
When you close on the purchase of a house, especially if you are a first-time homebuyer, you have high hopes about paying off the mortgage. You make a budget where you pay more than the minimum payment each month, thereby making a dent in the principal so that you pay less interest over time. … Read More »
Beware of Zero Percent Down Mortgages
Whether or not you were old enough to understand debt and financial risk when the 2008 housing market crisis happened, you were probably dismayed to hear about the people who borrowed subprime mortgage loans and then, to no one’s surprise, defaulted on them. How could anyone be so unscrupulous as to lend huge mortgages… Read More »
Can a Short Refinance Keep the Foreclosure Notices Away?
Mortgage foreclosure does not happen overnight. To a pessimist, this means that it is an agonizing process where the mortgage lender swats at you for months while taunting you with promises that it will leave you alone if only you can find a way to pay an increasingly exorbitant amount of money by an… Read More »
How to Save Money on Mortgage Interest Like They Do in the Netherlands
Adding the name of a foreign nationality to a product is a time-honored marketing gimmick. Everyone loves French toast and German chocolate cake, even if the closest equivalent in their namesake countries bears little resemblance to the product we look forward to buying from Denny’s or Giant Eagle. Even things that are profoundly unpleasant… Read More »
It’s a PITI Your Home Mortgage Payment Is So Unaffordable
Affordable homeownership is becoming an increasingly distant dream. It has never been harder to qualify for a home mortgage, and if you have one, it has never been harder to keep up with the payments. Interest rates have remained painfully high for about the past two years. People with fixed rate mortgages that they… Read More »
Will This Year’s Tax Credits Bring Home Ownership Within Your Reach?
Your financial circumstances have been dismal for as long as you can remember, perhaps for almost as long as you have been in the workforce. The thought that your slightly older contemporaries who graduated during the recession of 2008 thought that they could hold out for better times by going to graduate school, student… Read More »
How to Buy and Keep Your Own House in Philadelphia
Homeownership is a big financial goal for a lot of people. Unfortunately, it is very hard to achieve unless you already have some assets other than the percentage of your employment income that you have managed to put into savings. Qualifying for a mortgage and following through with the purchase is only the first… Read More »
Is Another Mortgage Foreclosure Crisis On The Horizon For Pennsylvania?
Being stressed out about money is the rule rather than the exception for working Americans. Most households are surviving paycheck to paycheck, even if more than one member of the household works full time; some people with annual income in the six figures still find themselves with bank account balances in the double digits… Read More »
