Real Estate

Government Mortgage Help Programs Scams and Deceptive Marketing and Mailings

by

It was with much fanfare last month that Congress and the Obama administration passed laws putting into effect government programs to help American homeowners with their mortgages.  Both The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, and The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act were front page news all over the country. A lot of this publicity was due to the fact that Americans have started to perceive the government as helping out Wall Street and big banks more than they are helping ordinary taxpayers and homeowners who did nothing wrong during the housing bubble and subsequent market collapse and banking collapse. However, the same publicity also made it easier for scammers and dishonest marketers to take advantage of people’s hopes by pretending to have something to do with the government programs when, in fact, they are either outright scams to steal your money or steal your identity, or they are mortgage brokers or mortgage companies that have nothing to do with the government mortgage aid programs trying to insinuate that they are part of those programs.  Unfortunately, many people are falling victim to these con artists and their tricks. How To Protect Yourself From Scams, Thieves, and Con Artists Using Government Mortgage Aid …

Read More

Refinancing the Mortgage to Take Advantage of Lower Interest Rates

by

Ok, it’s time to look at refinancing the old homestead’s mortgage.  I’ve been putting it off because of holidays and the fact that rates can still go lower even though the Fed recently cut rates to zero.  Now, it’s time to take a serious look at refinancing and how it might work out for my family.  I’ll be posting a series of articles here on Finance Gourmet to help guide you through the process.  By writing these articles in “real time” with my refinance adventure, you can see the whole process from A to Z and use it as a guide for your own refinancing now, and in the future. To make sure you don’t miss out, I recommend grabbing the RSS feed.  If you aren’t familiar with RSS or “feeds”, they are basically a way to get the article pulled from here by a RSS reader which is just software that goes and gets articles from the websites you ask it to watch.  That way, you don’t have to remember to open your bookmarks to get back here.  It is kind of like the old idea of subscribing to emails that updated you on website content, but this way, …

Read More

Buy Real Estate Now – Or Maybe Not

by

I’ve been a professional writer and business consultant for over a year now, but many people still remember me from my financial advisor days.  So, I get plenty of questions about investing, the stock market, and real estate.  The number one question I get these days, is, “Should I be buying real estate now?” The answer? Yes, if you need a new house. Real Estate Investment Cycles are Long The funny part about all of this to someone who has been “on the inside” is that these are the very same people who refused to have anything to do with the stock market following the Internet bubble of the late 1990s.  While I patiently tried to explain to them that buying low and selling high meant buying now, when things looked at their worst, they shook their heads and said they were going to do something else.  The same thing about the stock market holds for all investing.  Buying low and then selling at a higher price is how you make money.  But, here is the thing everyone seems to have forgotten, or maybe they just never knew.  Real estate market cycles take much longer than stock and bond investment …

Read More

Free MLS Listings No Realtor

by

I’ve written recently about our attempt to sell our home without a realtor using Iggyshouse.com.  We used them because we got a free MLS listing and a place to upload a ton of description and pictures.  Their site was down for a disturbingly long time in June and part of July but is back up for now.  The only reason I’m not blasting them is that our MLS listing stayed up the whole time.  Still, proceed with caution. There was some confusion about the MLS listings caused mostly by the way MLS operates.  As a member of the general public, you can search MLS to your heart’s content, but you cannot directly contact the sellers.  MLS does not list the contact information on any publicly available view of MLS, only on the version that you have to pay for.  This is how MLS maintains its monopoly position and forces people to use realtors.  In fact, one of the warnings from Iggyshouse is that it is against MLS rules to use pictures that have any contact info on them (because then you wouldn’t need a paying subscriber to get a phone number).  So, your picture can’t have your phone number at …

Read More

Sell Your Own Home – Update

by

Ok, I’ve stopped daily updates about selling our own home. Truth is, there just isn’t that much action in real estate to justify daily postings. However, today we have 3 showings scheduled, so that is very good news. We haven’t got much in the way of feedback. One of the downsides about selling your home without a realtor is that other real estate agents won’t talk to you in the same way. It isnt’ anything against people selling their homes themselves, it is just that they can’t be sure that the homeowner understands the code that goes along with giving feedback and might use something that is said later in a way that another realtor wouldn’t. So, we put out sheets to solicit feedback. That way either the client or the realtor can jot something down if they feel so inclined.

Get Rich Not So Quick in Real Estate

by

As you may have noticed, we are getting ready to sell our house.  After living in our first house for about 7 years, we’ve been in our last two for 2 and 3 years respectively. The interesting thing is that each time we have made a lot of money.  The past two times we’ve used this new wealth to buy more expensive houses.  This time, we’ll be trading down, but we will also be paying off every dollar of debt we have other than the new mortgage.  This isn’t insignificant when you consider that we are in our early thirties and both had to go to college on the back of student loans (including the wife’s three years in law school.) Looking back, I’ve noticed a parallel to the stock market.  In the stock market, there are day traders.  You probably remember more than one or two friends who tried this way to easy wealth in the late 90s.  Only, it turns out it isn’t so easy, and ironically, that most of the people who thought they were day traders really weren’t. A day trader buy and sells positions within the same day.  The entire concept is based upon taking …

Read More

Selling Your Own Home – Time Warp

by

Ok, so nothing at all on the house for two weeks. It was very weird because we were having a few showings every weekend day and one or two the other days with an off day every now and then. Then, all of the sudden, nothing! I checked everything out to make sure a phone number wasn’t wrong or anything. We panicked and called our realtor friend. She said not to worry and that these things go in cycles. Incidentally, this kind of hand holding is part of what you pay a real estate agent for. Anyway, the funny part is that the day she got back to me, I get a call. They want to setup a showing for…NOW. Oh, great, thanks for the notice. So, I race around and clean up the place (baby toys EVERYWHERE!) Then, two showing for Saturday. So, hopefully everything is still on track.

Sell Your Own Home – Day 14

by

You have to be kidding! My cell phone, which is the number we have put on all of our real estate marketing, was off yesterday all afternoon. I checked it this morning just to be sure and we have 2 showing requests on there from Friday. So, we scrambled to clean up and call the right people back. Both showings got scheduled and held so, Yea! Also, another call this morning for one more showing, so that is 3 for Saturday. That is perfectly respectable. The really good news is that the showings we’ve had so far represent a pretty good cross section of the local Realtors who “specialize” in our area which means that the people in the know are brining their clients here. So, we aren’t way overpriced or anything it would seem.

Sell Your Own Home – Day 13

by

So, it’s Friday and no calls for showings yet this weekend.  This is bad news as far as I can see.  Apparently after an initial burst of interest, it has dried up.  It is still early April and we planned to have our house on the market for a while, but I’d still like to have at least one showing lined up just to let me know the interest is still there.  Last weekend, I got several calls on Saturday to do Saturday showings but I figured that was because we were new to MLS that weekend.  We’ll see what happens from here.