Finance

Ken Mascia, the mortgage guru from Oxford Financial, is back today with the lowdown on Good Faith Estimates. Comparing Lenders, rates and closing costs can be as confusing as driving in a foreign country where you can’t read the road signs. It’s sad but true. Many lenders actually like it that way because they got [...]

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[youtube go4b7RWFBfE] Just came across this YouTube video of a news cast about a mortgage broker who was sold bogus leads from an on-line lead generation company. Lead generation might be one of the dirty little secrets of real estate and home finance. Or, depending on your opinion, it might be just another way of [...]

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Ken Mascia, the mortgage guru from Oxford Financial, is back today with the lowdown on Good Faith Estimates. Getting a mortgage loan can be very confusing and a lot of Lenders like it that way. They get you lost in the numbers and make you believe that you’re getting a better deal when they are [...]

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Ken Mascia from Oxford Financial is back today with some wisdom about the sub prime implosion and it’s impact on our Southeast Michigan real estate market. One topic has gotten a lot of press lately and it’s how everybody is in foreclosure. I have heard some of the craziest statements made as if they were [...]

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Just received news (not good news) from Lansing that the proposed moratorium on the pop up tax is not likely to come to be this year. We were looking at it as a short term stimulus for the housing market and were optimistic that it would have helped to motivate home buyers over the coming [...]

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Last week Larry Ruehlen from the West Bloomfield Observer-Eccentric called me to chat about the proposed moratorium on the pop-up tax, which, if passed, should help to stimulate sales of existing homes. My conversation with Larry made me think about some of the aspects of how this legislation will impact the way I sell real [...]

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Potentially good news out of Lansing for Michigan home sellers. Democrats are initiating legislation to allow home buyers to pay the same amount in taxes as the home seller was paying. Under the state’s current tax structure, the assessed taxable value of a home can rise annually by no more than 5 percent or the [...]

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It is Board of Review time again, and citizens across the state are headed in to appeal their property taxes. If they read the Freep today, the might be left with the impression that they are destined to be overtaxed. Yes, it does seem ironic that taxable values/SEV’s went up last year by 3.7%, the [...]

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I hear the craziest things that people have been told to do in order to rescue or improve their credit score. Have you ever gotten a copy of your credit report and then gone through it and closed all of the accounts you were not actively using? You thought this would be good for fraud [...]

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This came in my email today. I searched high and low (on Google) to find the source of the article, but I cannot. I would have linked to it if I had found it. I’ve spoken before about the problems with Proposal A. As a matter of fact, I think I have ranted about it [...]

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Josh Plummer, my favorite guy at Flagstar Bank, does a great job of keeping me up on the latest in the world of mortgages. He does it without making me yawn, which is a compliment, of course. Plummer recently put me on notice about a change in the law that makes PMI (Private Mortgage Insurance) [...]

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