Mortgages: March 2013 Archives
This question brought someone to my site:
If my house is going into foreclosure but the house is also in probate, can the lender actually go forward with the foreclosure sale while the house is in probate?
The short answer is yes.
The Trust Deed (or Mortgage Note), that was signed by the now deceased whomever, gives a security interest in the property to that lender in exchange for money. The lender lived up to their end of the bargain. That security interest is valid until the loan is paid off. It is not removed by the death of the person that signed over the security interest.
Probate takes an absolute minimum of nine months. During this time, the court will likely allow those members of your family to continue to live there, but they will not likely approve disposition of the asset except in an emergency, and that emergency is going to cost your heirs money for the courts, and money for the disposition. On the other hand, the lender still needs to get paid according to the terms of the contract, and they are entitled to foreclose if the terms are not being met. I'm not a lawyer, but I've never heard of an estate being permitted to declare bankruptcy, which some living folks use to temporarily stave off foreclosure, almost always to their eventual major detriment. Since the executor is claiming that the estate cannot pay its bills and rarely are dead people earning any more money, declaring bankruptcy would seem like an open and shut case of "the creditors get all of the assets and your heirs get nothing." Probably not what anybody who's part of the situation wants.
There are simple steps possible to avoid probate for major assets. A trust is probably the most flexible of these, in that the trust owns the asset and the successor trustee takes over the management and within the limits of the trust, does what needs to be done without the courts getting involved. Flexible, much cheaper than getting a probate court involved, and your heirs get control right away. But it requires planning ahead (which many people are loath to do, being in denial about the idea of death) and an upfront investment.
Given the fact that there is a loan and a Trust Deed against the property, somebody is going to have to make those payments until the loan is paid off, whether by outright payoff, refinancing, or sale. Given that in the absence of a trust, your heirs probably are not going to have access to any liquid wealth you left either as it is also locked up in probate, the odds are that your heirs are either going to have to come up with the cash out of pocket, or the property is going to be foreclosed upon.
There are some good options. If your heirs are wealthy and have the cash, perhaps some one or combination of them will make the payments in the interim if it's been agreed they will be compensated later. Not likely, I'll admit, and they're likely to drive a bargain for larger eventual replacement. In some instances, the probate judge may agree to taking out a Home Equity Line Of Credit (HELOC) to make the payments, but somebody's going to have to be able to qualify to make the payments, and a dead person is not on the list of options, which means somebody still living is going to have to do it. The rates on these are typically horrendous, and cost a lot more than a little bit of planning.
Another excellent option is life insurance. Life insurance passes (usually) tax free on death outside of probate to a named beneficiary. Therefore, it's available pretty much right away to pay bills and stuff. It's also leveraged money, so a few dollars now buys more dollars when you need them. The difficulty is that you've got to have it beforehand. There's that planning thing rearing it's ugly head again, and the upfront investment of the premium dollars for the life insurance policy. Finally, any money created by this becomes the property of those beneficiaries, and there is no way to compel them to spend the money on bills of the estate. If the beneficiary is the estate, well, the money is locked up in probate again, and you've got to get the probate judge to agree with doing the necessary.
Another option is the named beneficiary Transfer on Death feature of most investment accounts. These also transfer outside of probate to named beneficiaries. Problem is, they require the investment of those dollars beforehand, and they also require that you keep the beneficiaries current, and all of this requires, once again, planning. The money also becomes the property of the beneficiaries, just like life insurance, and if there's no named beneficiary, it gets locked up in probate.
There is no free, no-planning-necessary, magic bullet. I strongly suspect it's all part of the various Lawyers Full Employment Acts, but we've all got to take the system as it exists. At the very least, you've got to do some planning ahead, and an upfront investment is probably going to return itself several times over. Remember, everyone is going to die sometime - I know of precisely zero exceptions thus far in the history of the world. Denial of this simple fact simply digs you in deeper, and puts your heirs in line to have to lose or waste a major portion of what you would have left covering for your deficiency, as is evidenced by the person who asked this question.
Caveat Emptor
Original article here
I went to a "direct from the providers" seminar on credit reports and credit scores.
Some of this information has changed from previous information, and some of it will change in the future. Credit Reporting, FICO scores, and related items are an evolving knowledge, as they figure out how to better predict future performance of potential borrowers.
A FICO score is nothing more or less than a prediction of the likelihood of a particular consumer having a 90 day late in the next 24 months. It is a snapshot, based upon your position and your balances as reported at the exact moment it was run.
I learned a bit more about the various other credit reports besides mortgage. They emphasize different things (naturally) and score differently. Auto scores go to 900, where mortgages range 300 to 850. Landlord tenant screens are different from a mortgage score. Revolving credit screens are different than mortgage screens. Finally, and most important, the "Consumer Screen" reports you get on yourself will always have a higher credit score than the ones mortgage providers run.
What makes up your credit score? Inquiries are 10 percent of your credit score. They only go back twelve months. Whereas I've been informed in the past that additional inquiries will get you zonked, that is not the case currently. Depending upon your length of credit history, after three to five "hard" inquiries in the last twelve months, they quit counting. A hard inquiry is done at your request for reasons of granting credit. Fewer is better. Longer history of credit means they will allow you more inquiries.
Multiple mortgage inquiries, if done within the correct time frames, still only count as one, no matter how many. Automobile inquiries also count differently than other inquiries.
Types of credit used is 10%. They're looking for a reasonable balance between types. The absolute worst type of account to have is from one of those zero interest finance companies. You know the ones, "Buy this sofa now and no payments and no interest for twelve months." People who are broke but need or want stuff now do this, and that's why the hit happens. They are deferring payment on something they can't really afford. You suffer guilt by association.
15 percent is length of credit history. How long you have had revolving accounts divided by the number of revolving accounts you have had. You have three cards that have all been going for thirty years, that's a better picture than five cards of which four are brand new. As far as the credit score is concerned, however, five years is as good as forever.
I've been telling people not to close open accounts. This is confirmed as not a good thing to do. Closing an open account can cause your credit to drop by as much as 80 points in some circumstances. If it doesn't cost you anything, don't close it.
Balances is thirty percent of your score. There are significant hits at fifty and seventy five percent of your credit limit on each card. Significantly, a small balance is a little bit better than zero, even. This is one reason you want to charge something you'd buy anyway to your credit card, just make sure you pay it off when the bill comes. Some credit cards (specifically charge cards in particular, not to mention any specific names of charge card companies where the balance is due in full every month) will report your high balance as being your limit, which can have the effect that you appear to the reporting agency as "maxed out" if you've charged something big. So make certain your credit limit is being accurately reported. If your balance is incorrectly reported, in general the only way to correct it quickly is with a letter from the provider, signed and on their letterhead, saying "Your balance as of (date)is $X"
Payment history is 35 percent of your score. This is divided into three categories: within the last 6 months, 7 to 23 months old, and 24 months or older. If you have had a delinquent credit reported within 6 months, you are getting the full impact in terms of lowering of credit score. Between 7 and 23 months is a lesser impact. Over 24 months is still less impact.
Important: DO NOT PAY OFF OLD COLLECTION ACCOUNTS! It can cause a 100 point drop in your score. Here's why. You owed $X to company A, and five years ago they sent it out for collection. Now you go back and pay it off, and the date it's marked with is TODAY. It's gone from being over two years old to being current as of now, bringing the full impact to bear once more. The one exception to this is a deletion letter. If you get a deletion letter on their letterhead signed by them saying "Please delete this account," you can make it vanish off your credit report as if it never was. Note that you may still have to pay off collection accounts, but do it as a part of escrow, where the loan is done before your credit is hit.
There are tools out there that can be used to analyze and tell you how to improve your score or how best to improve it with a given amount of money.
Bankruptcy: Three things determine what kind of credit score you'll have coming out of bankruptcy. 1) Percentage of trade lines you include in the bankruptcy. More is worse, lower is better. Including half your trade lines will not hurt you nearly so bad as including all your trade lines. 2) Number of inquiries. If you've still got one or two open lines you didn't include, you may not need more after discharge and you won't go apply for more. The poor schmuck who includes everything needs more to start a credit history, and is dinged HARD for each turndown inquiry. 3) Post bankruptcy payment history: if you included everything in the bankruptcy, you have no history until you get more credit. Can you say, "Vicious Circle," boys and girls? No payment history is even worse than a bad payment history, but any reports of delinquencies after bankruptcy hits you much harder than if you were never bankrupt and had a late.
Last individual points:
Rate on credit card does not affect FICO score.
Nor does salary, occupation, employment history, title, or employer, although time in line of work is a separate criterion for mortgage providers.
Credit Repair Services cost a lot of money for things you can do for free.
If you are disputing a medical collection (and only a medical collection) it doesn't count on your score.
Caveat Emptor
Original here
This is something that many folks don't understand about the loan market.
The labels "conforming", "jumbo" or, more accurately, "non-conforming" and "temporary conforming" only apply to so-called "A paper" loans, largely underwritten through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac standards. The reasons for the labels are that they "conform" to Fannie and Freddie's requirements in all particulars, or that they conform in all respects except loan amount. But Loan to Value ratio, Debt to Income ratio, Time in Line of Work and everything else are according to the standards set down by Fannie and Freddie.
Government loans, VA and FHA, do not have conforming and Jumbo amounts. In the case of the VA loan, it's my understanding that they no longer have an explicit legal limit at all - just a limit on what lenders are willing to do given the limited nature of the guarantee. In the case of the FHA, there is a dollar limit, and it's usually even the same dollar limit at the upper bound as the temporary conforming limit. But to treat this as anything but a coincidence that saves brainwork on the part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development would be incorrect. In point of fact, the "regular" FHA limit is different from the conforming limit. Fannie and Freddie are now part of the government, but it's a different part than the FHA.
Subprime loans have none of this; only pricing and policy breakpoints, usually around $500,000, set by individual lenders.
So why is this such a big deal? You ask. Very simply, conforming loans get the best
tradeoff between rate and cost - what laymen think of as the best rates. It's an ambition worth having to have a conforming loan as opposed to anything else. The relationship between everything else varies over time, but you can expect sub-prime to have the highest rate/cost tradeoffs, while whether government beats non-conforming is time dependent. For about the past 18 months, government has been better, but back in 2003 for instance, non-conforming rates were generally lower than government - one more reason why government loans lost favor for several years. Conforming loans are also consistently available, and the government doesn't get involved. This was kind of a big deal several years ago when it could take four months for the government to process the paperwork needed for their loans. If I was told somebody wanted to buy my property with a government loan, there was quite a while there where I would have preferred another buyer.
Loans underwritten through Fannie and Freddie are also the most common sorts of loans out there, and they had the effect of standardizing the A paper market a couple decades back. When it was every lender for themselves, the standards varied by quite a bit. When they all want to sell to Fannie and Freddie, they all started using Fannie and Freddie's standards. Doing so meant they could loan the same money out several times per year, getting an origination bonus each time, rather than loan out the money and then only as it was repaid could they book the income. They could make far more money originating the loan and selling it to Fannie and Freddie than they could by actually holding it in their own portfolio. So-called "portfolio loans" still exist - large amounts of non-conforming loans end up being portfolio loans, which is one reason why they carry higher rates. When there's a ready, standardized secondary market for loan notes, and lenders can "turn" the money several times per year, they're willing to do the loans for less, which is a win for everybody.
Caveat Emptor
Original article here
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