Mortgages: September 2023 Archives

No, I'm not turning into a country western singer. Just got a search for "no closing costs no points loan cheapest rates loan". The visit (to this article) lasted less than a full second. The obvious implication was that it wasn't what that person was looking for.

One of the reasons consumers get mercilessly taken advantage of in mortgage and real estate is because they assume they know everything they need to. Unfortunately, the vast majority don't know everything they need to. Most of the time there are gaps in their knowledge that the unscrupulous can sail the Queen Mary through - sideways. Hence the fundamental dishonesty of almost all mortgage advertising.

As I have said before on many occasions, lowest rates do not go with no points or no closing costs loans. Period. One of these things does not go with the others. Rate and total cost of the loan are always a tradeoff. Nobody is going to give you money, of all things, for less than the cost of money.

This is not to say that one loan with no closing costs may not be cheaper than another loan with no closing costs. The point is that there will be lower rates available with some closing costs, progressively more so as you get higher closing costs. Then if you start paying points, there will be still lower rates available. There is a reason why they are paying all of your closing costs - you're choosing a loan with a higher rate than you otherwise could have gotten.

No cost loans can be and often are the smart thing to do (Unfortunately, the Congress of 2009-10 effectively outlawed the loans by requiring yield spread to be treated as a cost, which it isn't (not to consumers), and said yield spread was the only funding mechanism for it) . Because they are the only loans where there are no costs to to be recovered, they are the only loan that can possibly put you ahead from day one. Consider the zero cost loan as a baseline, and compute what lower rates will cost you in closing costs. Consider: If the zero cost loan is 6.75 percent and you currently owe $270,000, your new balance should be $270,000. If you can get 6.5 at par with closing costs of $3500, your new balance is $273,500. Your monthly interest in the first instance is $1518.75 to start. Your interest charges in the second case are 1481.46. The lower rate cost you $3500, but saves you 37.29 per month. Divide the cost by the savings, and you break even in the ninety-fourth month - not quite eight years. So in this example, if you think you're likely to refinance or sell within eight years (in other words, practically everyone), you'll be ahead with the zero cost loan.

If the loan has a fixed period of less than the break even time (any loan that goes adjustable in less than 94 months in this example), you also know that the costs are not a good investment. If this loan were only fixed for five or seven years the rates go to precisely the same rate after adjustment, underlying index plus the same margin. If you haven't broken even by then, you never will, even if you decide you want to keep the loan.

So whereas a true zero cost loan is often the best and smartest way to go, it will never be the lowest rate available. You need to choose carefully where on the spectrum you choose, because there's no going back once the loan has funded. All of the up-front costs are sunk, and you don't get your money back just because you don't keep the loan long enough to break even.

Caveat Emptor

Original here

>broker incurred 19 inquires in 1 week dropping my score.

B.S.

I'd go the full Penn and Teller on this one if I wasn't trying to stay family friendly. The law is clear on this one, and practice is fully compliant with the law. I've seen thousands of credit reports, sometimes with dozens of recent mortgage inquiries. It could be 1, 19 or 19,000 inquiries. As long as they are all mortgage inquiries, all inquiries within thirty days count as one one inquiry. And the credit reporters and credit modelers I'm familiar with all comply.

The best and the worst loan officers are brokers, who shop your loan around to multiple lenders. But you don't have to stick with one broker, and you are silly to do so. Shop your loan with half a dozen at least. I used to tell people to apply for at least two loans, but changes in the lending industry make that a waste of time now. In all practicality, the dual application is dead due to regulatory and financial market changes meant to drive clients away from brokers and towards direct lenders and higher cost loans.

Credit Report scores falling with repeated inquiries used to be a real issue. Years ago, there would be a game as each inquiry was a hit to your credit, so prospective mortgage providers would run your credit again and again, until they drove your score under some noteworthy creditworthiness break-point. They could still use their original report, but since anybody who ran your report after that would see a 678 instead of a 686, or a 572 instead of 588, it would be unlikely that they could provide as good a loan.

However, several years ago the National Association of Mortgage Brokers sponsored legislation in Congress to change this. It was hardly altruistic of them, people not having their score hurt by multiple inquiries means that they are more willing to allow brokers a chance to compete. Nonetheless, this was a major benefit for anyone who wants to be able to shop around for a mortgage like they might want to for any major purchase, and mortgages are the second biggest purchases most people make in their lifetime (the biggest being the property the mortgage loan secures!). No matter how selfish the motive, however, they still did you a major favor, as someone who might want to have a mortgage someday even if you don't now. Tell your mortgage broker thank you for that.

There is a limitation to this, and ironically it affects credit reports run at banks and credit unions, although not brokers. Because in order to qualify for this, the inquiry has to be run under a provider code that says, "inquiry for mortgage." Mortgage broker inquiry codes all say "inquiry for mortgage," because that's the only type of credit they deal with. But banks and credit unions give loans for other purposes also, so they have a minimum of two inquiry codes, one that says "mortgage inquiry," and one that says, "general inquiry." If you are talking to a loan officer at a bank, who does car loans and credit cards also, sometimes they use the wrong inquiry code, and it counts as another inquiry. Talk to four banks, potentially four inquiries. Talk to four brokers, unless you space them out by 30 days or more, it's never more than one inquiry.

So anybody who tells you not to let other mortgage providers run your credit because they might drive your score down is either unaware of the law, or simply trying to scare you because they are frightened of having to compete. Incompetent or a liar, one or the other - maybe both. When you get right down to it, they are really telling you that their loans aren't very good. Because so long as they are done within a few days, the fact is that any number of mortgage inquiries all count as precisely one inquiry.

Caveat Emptor

Original here

For a while there, the forty year mortgage had started to make a comeback, and a few lenders started introducing the fifty year mortgage. The reason, straight from the horse's mouth, the lender's representatives, is lowered payments. In an uncertain and unstable market, investors are nervous about interest only financing, and so the lenders are tightening up on the standards of who is able to qualify for that, while looking for another way to compete on the basis of lower payments. Any fig leaf to be getting their premium and avoid competing upon real price. One way that they do this is the Option ARM, or negative amortization loan. However, to anyone who does even a minimal amount of investigation those loans are like cutting your own throat. A lot of people will still sign up for them, but after Business Week did a feature calling them "Nightmare mortgages" more and more people finally started picking up on the tremendous downsides to those loans (and they were finally all but banned, too late to do any good), but if they still want too much house and they've got to be able to qualify for, and make, the payment, they need an alternative. That is the forty and now the fifty year loan.

Note that nobody does forty year fixed rate mortgages, let alone fifty. They do two and three year fixed rate loans, called the 2/38 and 3/37. Some lenders will also do a loan that amortizes over forty years, but the remaining balance is due in thirty years. This so-called 40/30 balloon has a lot in common with a thirty year fixed rate loan - including the fact that almost nobody goes more than five years without refinancing, so that the thirty year balloon should be no big deal. All of the preceding forty year loans are sub-prime loans, by the way, with prepayment penalties and higher rates than A paper. A Paper lenders doing the forty year loan are few and far between. People get longer durations from sub-prime lenders; A paper competes for the best borrowers - the ones who can really afford their loans - on rate/cost trade-off and underwriting standards. For those lenders doing the fifty year loan, it is pretty much the same story. The fifty year amortization due in thirty, the 2/48 and the the 3/47.

Because the lender is risking their money for a longer time, and with less amortization and therefore more risk, most of the lenders - particularly the ones looking to compete on rate that you would prefer to do business with - charge a slightly higher rate for forty year loans than thirty, and a little higher still for a fifty. The difference is not huge, but it is there. Where a 2/28 might be at 7%, the corresponding 2/38 might be at 7.125, and the 2/48 at 7.25 for the same cost. Sometimes they'll say that the difference is as small as a quarter point of cost for the forty year amortization as opposed to the thirty - but that's an eighth of a percent on the rate, at subprime's usual 1 point equals half a percent trade-off.

In my opinion, these longer amortization loans are mostly a marketing gimmick to lower the payment - slightly - for those who do not qualify for interest only under lender's guidelines. The forty year amortization started making a comeback early in 2005, most as the 2/38, and the fifty year about March of 2006.

My initial perception was that refusing interest only to these borrowers is a figleaf tossed to nervous mortgage investors, and this has been borne out by subsequent events. It's not like fifty year amortization is really going to make a difference, as opposed to interest only, from the point of view of remaining principal. If a 100% loan gets foreclosed any time in the first five years, or if property values decline further, the difference is basically insignificant. Let's do some math.

Assume a $200,000 loan on a $250,000 purchase in California, just so I can do it in one loan without worrying about PMI.

Unlike everyone else who has written on longer amortizing loans, I'm not going to obsess about "interest paid over the life of the loan," although if you keep them that observation is true. But that's almost irrelevant. These borrowers are going to refinance in a few years anyway, same as everyone else. That's just the way things are. But let's do look at the difference between interest paid in the first two years, the fixed period for most of these at the end of which people will refinance.

So under these conditions, the 40 year loan only saves $1668.96 in payments over the first two years, and the fifty $2131.92. So if we subtract these numbers off the deficit in the above table, we are left that the forty year loan costs us $1299.30 in net deficit as opposed to the thirty, and the fifty year loan costs us $2434.17 net of all savings. This on top of the fact that it really doesn't make that much difference in the income we need to qualify for the loan (which in my example is limited to cost of housing with no other payments). Just paying off a credit card that takes $100 payments per month will do more to help you qualify.

These numbers get worse, not better, in the bigger loans that the lenders are using them to justify. Let's assume a $400,000 loan on a $500,000 property instead:

Considering that over two years, the forty year payment saves $3339.92 in payments, it's still down by $2599.38 as opposed to the thirty year amortization, and the fifty is down by $4869.83 in just two years - never mind what happens if you have to do it again in two years, and once again, paying off a credit card probably will do more to help someone qualify full documentation.

I don't see anything particularly wrong with forty and fifty year mortgages, although a thirty year loan is better while making very little difference on the payments, I can see some benefits for those who lie in this income range. But pardon my lack of enthusiasm for something that makes very little difference to whether someone qualifies for the loan, while costing them far more than they save in terms of payments, even over the short term and disregarding the effects if the people do not refinance. Far better to just persuade someone not to buy quite so much house in the first place, even if it means you get less of a commission. But then if most real estate agents sold property on the basis of what people could afford rather than it's beautiful and they want it and therefore it's an easy sale and now let's figure out a way to get them the property even if they can't afford it, the southern California real estate market would not have been in the state it has been in these past several years.

Caveat Emptor

Original here