Recent Articles
Beverly Hills Real Estate - A Sign of Things to Come?
written by Sarah Strauss
According to the Micro Market Report, a local report published by Teles Properties in Beverly Hills, real estate sales are on the rise in the posh locale. The report suggests first-time home buyers are back in the market, pushing the median sale price up from $1.475 million in March 2008 to $1.74 million in April. [...]
Fed Lowers Rate…Down to 2% Now
written by Sarah Strauss
The Federal Open Market Committee decided today to lower its target for the federal funds rate 25 basis points to 2 percent.
Recent information indicates that economic activity remains weak. Household and business spending has been subdued and labor markets have softened further. Financial markets remain under considerable stress, and tight credit conditions and the deepening [...]
Get Twice Daily Mortgage News Headlines from Truthful Lending dot Com
written by John Crenshaw
If you’re already subscribed to our RSS feed, you’ve no doubt noticed that we publish mortgage-related news headlines twice daily to the news feed, and these headlines can’t be found anywhere on the site. You may have wondered why that is. Well, the headlines are aggregated from several sources around the web (more to come), [...]
Marginal Vs Average Tax Rate
written by Sarah Strauss
The difference between marginal and average tax rates is a fairly important concept for all tax payers to better understand the way the government gets paid. You’ve probably heard both terms, but maybe never knew what they were. Well, let’s fix that.
New Liabilities May Damage United States’ AAA Credit Rating
written by John Crenshaw
Since the subprime mess rocked the mortgage world early this year, the government has authorized the quasi-governmental agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to lessen their qualification requirements and allow more homeowners to refinance into conforming loans. In doing so, these agencies have taken on a greater risk in an effort to alleviate some of [...]
Oops! Our Database Crashed.
written by Sarah Strauss
This site is run off the popular content management system/blogging platform, Wordpress. Thanks to John Crenshaw’s amazing skills with the software for porting it into a real article database (if you know what Wordpress is, you’d have no idea this site was run using that software). While he may be good at coding websites, I [...]
Jumbo-Conforming Loan Limit Up to $729,750
written by John Crenshaw
In accordance with the Economic Stimulus Package signed into law earlier this year, conforming mortgage loan limits have increased in many areas around the country. According to Fannie Mae, these increases are by county and will not affect all counties in the U.S.1
The measure is designed to ease the troubled housing market and the economy [...]
“Soft” and “Hard” Credit Inquiries - What’s the Difference?
written by John Crenshaw
Back in the heyday of the mortgage market when shady brokers were selling their socks off (which really wasn’t long ago now), they used the terms “soft” and “hard” credit inquiries when talking about pulling borrower’s credit scores. In fact, confusion about the difference between these types of inquiries was an easy thing for shady [...]
Washington Mutual Shuts Down Wholesale Lending
written by Sarah Strauss
Washington Mutual made the decision yesterday to shut down operation of it’s wholesale lending arm as well as close the doors on all of its standalone home loan centers according to a WAMU spokeswoman1.
WAMU and the Subprime Market
WAMU made what now seems like a pretty bad decision several years ago to enter the subprime mortgage [...]