Smart Borrower Blog

Archive for October, 2007

How Mortgage Lenders Lost Their Way

One of the questions I am often asked is how mortgage lenders could have made so many crappy loans over the past several years and not know it? While there is no simple answer, I do have my own theories as to what happened. Greed is the obvious answer, but I believe the real answer […]

Hold My Hand While I Borrow Thousands

A lot has been written lately about the state of the mortgage lending business. Although I totally agree that lenders have both a fiduciary and moral duty to the borrowers they work with, and in many cases they have failed, I also feel–strongly–that borrowers must take responsibility for some of their actions. We all know […]

Cool New Mortgage Rate Tool

Loan.com just launched a nifty new rate graph tool that provides a display of rates for various loan products over a recent snapshot of time. But WAIT! That’s not the cool part. The news is that you can get this gadget for your own website. See right below it, where it says “get this for […]

The Housing Market Bailout

First, let me apologize to readers for not being able to post the second part of the interview with Damion Flynn.  I did an upgrade to my Linux box today and am having some issues accessing the article.  I will post as soon as I can get this straightened out. We look today at the […]

Interview With Damion Flynn, Realtor

In a recent post, I mentioned that I would like to do an interview with a Realtor in Gulfport, MS. I’ve known Damion Flynn for several years, having met him on Rich-Jerks.com membership site. This was shortly after Katrina, and Mr. Flynn gave me some real insight into what was going on in Gulfport after […]

The Pension Plan View

Today, while searching news about the mortgage market, I kept running across references to Countrywide financial Corp and the concern over CEO Anthony Mozilo.  I have written about Countrywide a lot in the past few months, and though it may seem that I single out the company, the fact remains that the fallout from everything […]

Cool New Mortgage Rate Tool

Loan.com just launched a nifty new rate graph tool that provides a display of rates for various loan products over a recent snapshot of time. But WAIT! That’s not the cool part. The news is that you can get this gadget for your own website. See right below it, where it says “get this for […]

Quirky Guidelines You Should Know

One of the reasons we tell consumers to get pre-approved BEFORE shopping for a house is so we can avoid any last minute financing issues.  Often times, consumers are unaware of the little underwriting rules that could potentially sink their deal.  Believe me, there are a lot of them.  What usually happens is someone thinks […]

Financing a Remodeling Project

If your remodeling or addition project is extensive, you may be wondering where the funds will come from. It is much easier than most people realize to get financing for a home upgrade–especially if you already have equity in the property. You may have equity because you have paid the mortgage down, or you may […]

The Problem With SIV’s

I had no idea until today what a “structured investment vehicle” was.  I am of course not a banker or mortgage lender, so I just felt that it was just one of those things I didn’t know about nor had much use knowing.  It really came as a surprise to me to learn that many […]