Tag Archives: assets

Mortgage Broker v. Loan Officer

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MagnifyMoney.com quoted me in Mortgage Broker vs. Loan Officer: The Best Way to Shop for a Mortgage (must scroll down). It opens,

When you need to take out a loan to buy a home, you generally have two options. You can work with a lender’s loan officer or hire a mortgage broker. Loan officers and mortgage brokers are not the same thing, although the terms are often used interchangeably.

Loan officers work for a bank or a lender and will only be able to show you mortgage options from that financial institution. In contrast, mortgage brokers are individuals or firms that are licensed by a state to act as middlemen between you and multiple banks or mortgage lenders. Because brokers aren’t beholden to a particular lender, they can shop around and try to find you a loan with terms that best fit your circumstances.

Why should you consider working with a mortgage broker?

One of the biggest benefits to working with a mortgage broker is that they take over the job of shopping for a loan. You might be able to do this on your own, and in some cases, you could find a better loan than the broker, but it can be a time-consuming and complicated process.

A broker can help collect and organize the documents you need to apply for a mortgage, such as your proof of employment and income, tax returns, a list of your assets and debts, and credit reports and scores. The broker can then use the information to look for loans, compare rates and terms, and apply for mortgages on your behalf.

Casey Fleming, a mortgage adviser and author of “The Loan Guide: How to Get the Best Possible Mortgage,” says one of the big benefits is that brokers are generally “on your side,” while a loan officer represents the lender’s interest. Brokers are also incentivized to find you a loan that meets your needs and see the deal through closing because they don’t get paid until you close on the home.

Additionally, brokers might have access to lenders that don’t work directly with consumers, meaning you wouldn’t be able to get a loan from the lender even if you tried. And in some cases, brokers can leverage their relationship with a lender to get it to waive fees you’d otherwise have to pay.

Are there risks involved with using a mortgage broker?

While working with a broker could be a good idea, there are potential drawbacks to consider. “Not all brokers are created equal,” says Fleming. “Many have only a few sources for loans, and may not be able to find the best pricing.” There are also some mortgage lenders that don’t work with brokers and will only offer loans directly to consumers (through one of the lender’s loan officers).

Using a mortgage broker can also be expensive. Although you may find the services are worth paying for, consider the costs of using a broker:

Mortgage broker fees

Mortgage brokers are often paid in one of two ways. You may be able to choose how you’d like to pay the broker, or opt for both payment methods.

Some mortgage brokers will charge you a commission based on the loan you take out, often about 1% of the loan. For example, that’s a $3,000 fee on a $300,000 mortgage loan. You’ll pay this fee as part of your closing costs when you close on the home.

Other brokers may offer you a fee-free mortgage. However, what likely happens in this case is that the mortgage broker arranges a loan with a higher interest rate, leaving room for the lender to give the broker a cut. This route could cost you more over the lifetime of the loan but might be the better option if you want to minimize costs now.

Where to find a good mortgage broker

“Word of mouth is very useful when it comes to finding a good [mortgage broker],” according to Professor David Reiss, a real estate law professor at the Brooklyn Law School in Brooklyn, N.Y. You could ask friends or family members who’ve recently bought a home if they used a mortgage broker, as well as your real estate agent if he or she can recommend a broker.

However, don’t settle for the first recommendation you receive. The Federal Trade Commission recommends interviewing several brokers and trying to find one who’ll be a good fit for your home search.

Ask about their experience with buyers like you in the area, the fees they charge, and how many lenders they work with. “You want to know whether the mortgage broker can find competitive mortgage products, is well organized so that loans close in a timely manner, and whether it keeps away from bait-and-switch tactics that can be so difficult to deal with when buying a home,” says Reiss.

The Mortgage After a Spouse’s Death

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photo by Dr. Neil Clifton

BeSmartee.com quoted me in What Happens to My Mortgage When My Spouse Dies? It opens,

We would like to help by answering the question of what happens to your mortgage when your spouse dies, and we’ve asked several experts to chime in.

It’s bad enough when your spouse dies, but to also worry about what will happen with your mortgage only adds to the turmoil. We would like to help by answering the question of what happens to your mortgage when your spouse dies, and we’ve asked several experts to chime in.

When You Are on the Deed

If you and your spouse took out a mortgage loan together, you would then be responsible for paying the mortgage by yourself if your spouse dies. ”If the surviving spouses’ name is on the mortgage, they are now responsible for the entire mortgage,” says Randall R. Saxton, a Madison, MS, attorney. But you have inherited your spouses’ half of the home, which typically means you don’t need to change the title.

Your partner’s passing doesn’t disqualify the mortgage or let the lender call it in immediately, using a ”due-on-sale” clause. Such clauses let mortgage lenders demand the entire mortgage be paid if a new owner assumes the mortgage, or they take the house back. But the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982 prohibits lenders from using the due-on-sale clause when your spouse dies. But you would need to be able to handle the mortgage payments on your own to keep the house. ”While the lender cannot automatically foreclose due to the death of the mortgagee, they will be able to foreclose if the surviving spouse is unable to pay,” says Saxton.

Saxton has a suggestion: ”I always recommend life insurance policies, which would enable the surviving spouse to either pay off or maintain the payments of the mortgage.”

When You Are Not on the Deed

If you are not on the mortgage deed and your partner dies, your partner’s will should determine whether you get the house. If your partner didn’t have a will, your spouses’ assets will be distributed according to your state’s intestate laws.

Typically you, as the surviving spouse, will get your spouses’ assets after all expenses, such as funeral expenses and other debts, are paid. If there are enough assets in the estate, the mortgage will be paid. ”The estate will pay off the mortgage during probate,” says Aviva S. Pinto, CDFA, a wealth advisor at Bronfman E. L. Rothschild in New York City. ”If there are not sufficient assets to cover all debts, the house will have to be sold to pay off the debt,” says Pinto.

If you have children, your share is split with them. ”For example, if there is only one child of the deceased, the surviving spouse will own 50 percent of the property, and the child will own 50 percent of the property,” says Saxton. ”If neither [of you] pay the mortgage, the lender will be able to foreclose.”

Your Mortgage Lender Should Offer Help

No matter your particular situation, if your partner dies, you should contact your mortgage lender as soon as possible. They can help guide you on what will happen and your options. ”The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has recently issued a rule to provide more protections to the survivors of a homeowner,” says David Reiss, professor of law at Brooklyn Law School. ”The rule gives widowed spouses some help in dealing with mortgage issues at a difficult time.”

Here are some specifics on how your mortgage lender can help, according to Reiss:

1. Mortgage servicers have to tell the widowed spouse about the documents that are necessary to confirm his or her status as a successor in interest to the deceased spouse.

2. Servicers are also required to provide many of the same notices and documents to the surviving spouse who is a successor in interest that the deceased spouse would have received.

Retiring with a Mortgage

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MassMutual quoted me in Is it OK to Retire with a Mortgage? It opens,

The conventional wisdom is that you should pay off your mortgage before you retire. Yet, about 4.4 million retired homeowners still had a mortgage in 2011, according to an analysis of American Community Survey data by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). More than half of them spend 30 percent or more of their income on housing and related expenses, a percentage that may be uncomfortably high even for working homeowners.

Not having to put such a large percentage — or any percentage — of your retirement income toward a monthly mortgage payment in retirement will certainly make it easier to meet your other expenses. But is it really so bad to have a mortgage payment during retirement?

“The logic behind the rule of thumb is that your income will go down in retirement, so it would be helpful if your monthly expenses went down significantly as well,” said David Reiss, a law professor who specializes in real estate and consumer financial services at Brooklyn Law School in New York. But if your income from Social Security and a pension (if you have one), and to some extent your assets (the nest egg you plan to draw on for additional retirement income), will be sufficient to make your monthly mortgage payment and meet your other expenses in retirement, there is no real reason that you have to get rid of the mortgage, he said. The key is that keeping your mortgage during retirement should be part of a plan and not a response to a crisis.

More Homeowners are Retiring with a Mortgage

More homeowners retired with a mortgage in 2011 than a decade earlier, according to the CFPB’s analysis of U.S. census data.1 They’re less likely to have their homes paid off because they’re purchasing later in life, making smaller down payments and tapping equity for other purchases.1 In fact, 36.6 percent of homeowners ages 65 to 74 and 21.2 percent homeowners age 75 and older (some of whom may not be retired yet) had mortgages or home equity loans in 2010, according to the Federal Reserve. The median balance was $79,000 for the 65 to 74 age group, and $58,000 for the 75 and up age group.

The CFPB points out two problems with carrying a mortgage during retirement: less accumulated net wealth and the possibility of foreclosure if retirees can’t make their mortgage payments. Foreclosure is harder to recover from when you’re older because you may not be able to return to the workforce to compensate for the loss and because you’re more likely to have health problems or cognitive impairments, the CFPB said.1

Having less accumulated net wealth is a problem, especially if most of your wealth consists of your home equity, which is less liquid than stocks, bonds and cash. Foreclosure is a serious problem if it happens to you, but the odds are slim: even in the aftermath of the housing crisis, in 2011, foreclosure rates were only 2.55 percent for homeowners 65 to 74 and 3.19 percent for homeowners 75 and older.

Some retirement-age homeowners who haven’t paid off their mortgages undoubtedly would rather be debt free but couldn’t afford to retire their home loan sooner. But others might be putting the money that could have gone toward extra mortgage payments to a better use. (footnotes omitted)

Protecting Seniors’ Home Equity

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photo by Ethan Prater

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has issued and Advisory and Report for Financial Institutions on Preventing Elder Financial Abuse. The Report defines elder financial exploitation as

the illegal or improper use of an older person’s funds, property or assets. Studies suggest that financial exploitation is the most common form of elder abuse and yet only a small fraction of incidents are reported. Estimates of annual losses range from $2.9 billion to $36.48 billion. Perpetrators who target older consumers include, among others, family members, caregivers, scam artists, financial advisers, home repair contractors, and fiduciaries (such as agents under power of attorney and guardians of property).

Older people are attractive targets because they may have accumulated assets or equity in their homes and usually have a regular source of income such as Social Security or a pension. In 2011, the net worth of households headed by a consumer age 65 and older was approximately $17.2 trillion, and the median net worth was $170,500. These consumers may be especially vulnerable due to isolation, cognitive decline, physical disability, health problems, and/or the recent loss of a partner, family member, or friend.

Cognitive impairment is a key factor in why older adults are targeted and why perpetrators succeed in victimizing them. Even mild cognitive impairment (MCI) can significantly impact the capacity of older people to manage their finances and to judge whether something is a scam or a fraud. Mild cognitive impairment is an intermediate stage between the expected cognitive decline of normal aging and the more serious decline of dementia. Studies indicate that 22 percent of Americans over age 70 have MCI and about one third of Americans age 85 and over have Alzheimer’s disease. (8-9, footnotes omitted)

The CFPB recommends that financial institutions consider

  • training staff to recognize abuse;
  • using fraud detection technologies;
  • offering age-friendly services; and
  • reporting suspicious activities to authorities.

These recommendations are a step in the right direction, although they offer no panacea. As the Report acknowledges, even if financial institutions report suspicious activities to government authorities, there is no guarantee that they will be acted on. But if these recommendations are publicized, they may deter some predators who think that they can act freely within the fog of their victims’ cognitive decline. And a few well-publicized prosecutions of relatives, caregivers and advisors who violate the trust that was placed in them would help to spread the message that ripping off senior citizens is no easy path to riches.

Keeping Cash on Hand

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1127px-American_CashTheStreet.com quoted me in Why Some Investors Are Keeping Large Sums of Money in Cash. It reads, in part,

Investors are still holding large positions in cash amid the continued volatility in the stock market since they remain uncertain about the outlook of the economy.

After being spooked by the markets this year — evinced by the 21 times the Dow gained or lost 200 or more points through March 1 compared to only nine in 2015 — investors are finding a large cash reserve to be a reassuring cushion.

A report by Capgemini and RBC Wealth Management in 2015 cites the total cash held by high net households or those who have $1 million or more investable assets in North America as $3.8 trillion. Out of that total, $3 trillion to 3.5 trillion of those assets are estimated to be in the U.S., said Gary Zimmerman, CEO of MaxMyInterest, a New York-based company that maximizes cash balances for savers.

One reason cash remains popular among all age groups is because the sentiment of the economy, job growth and markets is viewed unfavorably. Data on the amount of cash that consumers keep in checking or savings accounts or CDs are not tracked.

“Cash is still a favored asset for investors, because frankly, people are nervous about the economy,” said Sean Stein Smith, a CPA in Hackensack, N.J.

Even wealthy people are allocating large sums of their assets in cash, with 23.7% of high net worth people keeping their portfolios in cash in 2015, according to the report.

 *     *     *

Homeowners should also consider starting a repair fund in addition to having emergency savings to cover household expenses, said David Reiss, a law professor at Brooklyn Law School in N.Y. Some repairs need to be made immediately such as a roof leaking during the rainy season or the boiler during winter months.

“A homeowner who wanted to be conservative could put an amount equal to 10% of his or her mortgage payment into a comparable fund for home repairs,” he said. “There is probably not one right answer for everyone. Some people are handy and can do all sorts of repairs themselves, others can’t.”

Monday’s Adjudication Roundup

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New FHA Guidelines No Biggie

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(Original Purchases in Levittown Funded in Large Part by FHA Mortgages)

Law360 quoted me in New Guidelines For Bad FHA Loans Won’t Boost Lending (behind paywall). It opens,

The federal government on Thursday provided lenders with a streamlined framework for how it determines whether the Federal Housing Administration must be paid for a loan gone bad, but experts say the new framework will have limited effect because it failed to alleviate the threat of a Justice Department lawsuit.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development provided lenders with what it called a “defect taxonomy” that it will use to determine when a lender will have to indemnify the FHA, which essentially provides insurance for mortgages taken out by first-time and low-income borrowers, for bad loans. The new framework whittled down the number of categories the FHA would review when making its decisions on loans and highlighted how it would measure the severity of those defects.

All of this was done in a bid to increase transparency and boost a sagging home loan sector. However, HUD was careful to state that its new default taxonomy does not have any bearing on potential civil or administrative liability a lender may face for making bad loans.

And because of that, lenders will still be skittish about issuing new mortgages, said Jeffrey Naimon, a partner with BuckleySandler LLP.

“What this expressly doesn’t address is what is likely the single most important thing in housing policy right now, which is how the Department of Justice is going to handle these issues,” he said.

The U.S. housing market has been slow to recover since the 2008 financial crisis due to a combination of economics, regulatory changes and, according to the industry, the threat of litigation over questionable loans from the Justice Department, the FHA and the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

In recent years, the Justice Department has reached settlements reaching into the hundreds of millions of dollars with banks and other lenders over bad loans backed by the government using the False Claims Act and the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act.

The most recent settlement came in February when MetLife Inc. agreed to a $123.5 million deal.

In April, Quicken Loans Inc. filed a preemptive suit alleging that the Justice Department and HUD were pressuring the lender to admit to faulty lending practices that they did not commit. The Justice Department sued Quicken soon after.

Policymakers at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which serves as the conservator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and HUD have attempted to ease lenders’ fears that they will force lenders to buy back bad loans or otherwise indemnify the programs.

HUD on Thursday said that its new single-family loan quality assessment methodology — the so-called defect taxonomy — would do just that by slimming down the categories it uses to categorize mortgage defects from 99 to nine and establishing a system for categorizing the severity of those defects.

Among the nine categories that will be included in HUD’s review of loans are measures of borrowers’ income, assets and credit histories as well as loan-to-value ratios and maximum mortgage amounts.

Providing greater insight into FHA’s thinking is intended to make lending easier, Edward Golding, HUD’s principal deputy assistant secretary for housing, said in a statement.

“By enhancing our approach, lenders will have more confidence in how they interact with FHA and, we anticipate, will be more willing to lend to future homeowners who are ready to own,” he said.

However, what the new guidelines do not do is address the potential risk for lenders from the Justice Department.

“This taxonomy is not a comprehensive statement on all compliance monitoring or enforcement efforts by FHA or the federal government and does not establish standards for administrative or civil enforcement action, which are set forth in separate law. Nor does it address FHA’s response to patterns and practice of loan-level defects, or FHA’s plans to address fraud or misrepresentation in connection with any FHA-insured loan,” the FHA’s statement said.

And that could blunt the overall benefits of the new guidelines, said David Reiss, a professor at Brooklyn Law School.

“To the extent it helps people make better decisions, it will help them reduce their exposure. But it is not any kind of bulletproof vest,” he said.