Dan Melson: January 2015 Archives
What Consumers Need To Know About Mortgages (A Guide About What Really Happens From a Mortgage Insider) is now available on Amazon!
Kindle edition only $4.99 through February 28th!
This book is intended to cut through the nonsense and teach consumers what they need to know to deal with mortgages.
What you need to know and how to shop your loan so you end up with the best loan possible at the time, instead of getting stuck with a bad mortgage.
There is an entire chapter devoted to how not to inadvertently sabotage your own mortgage application.
How to not waste thousands of dollars choosing the wrong mortgage
418 pages covering everything consumers need to know from basics like credit score, to how your application is evaluated, to how to handle the process from start until the loan funds and is recorded. Real snags and stumbling points people have brought me over the last ten years of running this website, with common sense solutions.
Want to know how to improve your application? It's inside.
How to respond to common snags? Read the book!
Reading this will also help real estate agents understand how to keep consumers and transactions from going bad.
(I do apologize that the physical book edition is pricier than I'd like. It will drop with larger print runs)
The first thing to understand is that the entire machine of loans is completely impersonal. I don't mean that you're necessarily just one more cog in the machine to your loan officer, as I can't remember encountering a loan officer who thought like that. But the mechanisms of whether your loan in particular is approved have precisely zero to do with whether you're a good or virtuous person, whether you deserve a chance, or anything other than how well you fit the profile of someone who can repay this loan. Understand that. Your bank doesn't give a damn if you're black, white, brown, red, yellow, or pink with purple polka dots. They care about green - money. They don't care whether you're a man or a woman, what your sexual orientation is, or anything else. They make their decisions based upon how well you fit the profile of someone who can repay the loan. How much you make, how stable that income is, how much of that income is obligated to other payments, how well you manage credit and a host of other factors. Except as I will note later, they don't care how much equity is in the property. Banks are not in the business of owning property, and they lose money when they have to foreclose no matter how much equity is in the property. They're in the loan business. They care about whether you fit the profile of someone who will repay that loan. Not having enough equity for the loan guidelines will lose you a loan, but having more won't get your loan approved. In the course of funding well over a thousand loans from dozens of lenders, I have never seen or heard race, ethnicity, sex, or orientation of the applicants mentioned in any sort of communication other than by government mandate for gathering the information. If it weren't required by the government on a mandated government form, I have precisely zero evidence that anyone at any lender I have ever submitted a loan to cares. What they want to know is whether you fit the profile of someone who will repay that loan.
How do you fit the profile? Earn a steady income from a consistent source. Save enough for a down payment that fits the underwriting profile, which varies from zero to twenty percent or so. Manage your credit well. Make your payments on time. Don't try to borrow more than you can afford to repay. Be able to document everything. I'll go over all of this in considerable detail later in the book, but the criteria are all financial. The rest doesn't matter. The banks don't care if you're Democrat or Republican, statist or anarchist, or which way you put your toilet paper rolls in the bathroom dispenser.
Coming Soon from Amazon
The Book on Mortgages Everyone Should Have
What Consumers Need To Know About Mortgages
The Book on Buying Real Estate Everyone Should Have
What Consumers Need To Know About Buying Real Estate
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The Man From Empire
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A Guardian From Earth
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Empire and Earth
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Working The Trenches
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Rediscovery 4 novel set
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Preparing The Ground
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The Invention of Motherhood
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