Question of the week: Who pays who when I buy a home and when? Answer: Who pays who how much and when in a real estate transaction is always negotiable between buyer and seller and those involved. In theory this can happen, in our local Southern California markets here is who customarily pays what to […]
Question of the week: Why should I pay more than the seller is asking? Answer: Because you want the home. We are currently in a sellers’ market in most Southern California housing markets. Buyers are writing offers on homes and being told by their agents that there are multiple offers on the property, which could […]
Question of the week: How come when the market is bad rates drop and when market is good rates rise? Answer: Last week we looked at the relationship between the price of a mortgage and the mortgage’s interest rate. Using a teeter-totter we saw that the lower the interest rate the higher the price and […]
Question of the week: Why are there different prices for the same loan? Answer: There is a difference between price and rate, it is an inverse relationship. On the graphic above the dollar sign, $, representing the cash needed to close your transaction, includes down payment (if applicable), loan points, loan fees, appraisal, escrow and […]
Question of the week: What are Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae? Answer: Last week we answered why if you have a Fannie Mae loan you do not make your payment to Fannie Mae. So what is Fannie Mae, its brother Freddie and cousin Ginnie? Before we get to what they are and do, […]
Question of the week: I have a Fannie Mae loan, why am I not making my payment to Fannie Mae? Answer: It has been a while since we did a review of how the mortgage rate markets work and with many new readers of the Weekly Rate & Market Update time for a primer on […]
Question of the week: We are thinking about selling our current home and buying a new one, is this a good time? Answer: We’ve been this question a lot lately as we run numbers for clients to determine whether a refinance of their existing mortgage makes. “We don’t know if we want to stay here […]
Question of the week: With home prices as high as they are do you think we are facing another housing bubble? Answer: No. Last week’s data on median sales prices in Southern California resulted in this question being asked a few times. To recap the California Association of Realtors reported last week that the median […]
Question of the week: Do you have a method to pay off debt without using our home’s equity? Answer: Continuing our series on refinances and whether to take any cash out, as I mentioned last week this week I will go through process that I have used with many clients over the years to pay […]
Question of the week: Does it make sense to pull money out of my home to pay off other debt? Answer: This question is now the third in a series of Questions of the Week on refinancing. First the question was whether to pull out cash from home now for use later, last week was […]
