When clients contact me for the first time, I am often asked what, exactly, I do. People understand what a bank is, and they understand, to some extent, what a mortgage broker is. But a Mortgage Banker is a strange term that isn’t in the standard lexicon of most people. So when I’m asked, I […]

There are many ways to get a mortgage. Some benefit borrowers with large down payments, some benefit those with less to put down; some benefit borrowers who plan to be in the home for less than 7 years, some benefit borrowers who plan to be there for 30 years; some benefit borrowers with good credit, […]

This is a very interesting topic, which is a popular questions, especially for first time homebuyers. I run into many young executives and engineers who recently graduated from college and have been working for several years at their first job, but know they will be switching companies at some point in the not-so-distant future. So […]

After you buy a house in Michigan, there is a lot that needs to be done. You need to set up utilities, figure out moving arrangements, childcare arrangements if you have kids, update your driver’s license, and so on. But there are two important forms which must be filed with the Tax Assessor’s Office that […]

It’s surprising to me how often people ask me about automatic payments. Something which, in the grand scheme of the mortgage process, seems so inconsequential can really get some people thinking. But while I consider the mortgage process from a processing and underwriting standpoint, the payment piece becomes the long-term concern for the borrower. So […]

On Tuesday, I wrote about the relative worth of mortgage insurance. For some, it is a welcome expense; for others, it is a needless expense best avoided. But for those who go the mortgage insurance route, it is usually not very long before they want to get rid of that extra monthly insurance payment. To […]

The value of mortgage insurance is different for every potential home buyer. To some, it is a way to get into a larger house or into a house, at all. For others, it is an unnecessary additional expense, only offering an unnecessarily large budget or small down payment. So the value of mortgage insurance is […]

The foreclosure inventory has waned over the last few years and the foreclosure price tags have come up. Where in 2010 or 2011 you could have purchased just about any Real Estate Owned home (foreclosure), it is now a much riskier gambit. This has led many of the talking heads to warn homebuyers of the […]

Many potential homebuyers I have spoken to have told me they are sitting on the sidelines until the fall or winter. The housing market jumped up tremendously last year, and is up again this year, meaning your dollar isn’t going quite as far as it did two years ago. Generally, as we leave the summer […]

As I discussed on Tuesday, FICO is changing some things in their scoring models. They will be excluding medical collections and paid collections when calculating FICO scores, meaning many people will see a significant increase in their credit score. So if you did not qualify for a mortgage a month ago, when these rules changes […]