Tonight CNBC is (re)airing an amazing show called “Marijuana Inc.: Inside America’s Pot Industry.” CNBC has aired the special a couple times now, but if you’ve missed it, or haven’t heard of it yet, you should check it out. It’s an interesting look into what CNBC calls a “thriving industry…raking in what’s estimated to be [...]

CNBC has a pretty interesting series called American Greed, during which they detail legendary white collar crimes and how they were planned and carried out. Tonight (Wednesday, Jan 7th, 2008) at 9:00 pm American Greed covers the story of Matt Cox, Rebecca Hauck, and Alison Arnold, who engineered a classic mortgage scam that took advantage [...]

Former NASDAQ Chairman, Bernard Madoff has allegedly been running a Wall Street ponzi scheme of epic proportions, bilking investors out of an estimated $50 billion.
Madoff is the founder of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC and separately managed money for high-net-worth individuals and hedge funds through an investment advisory business he oversaw. Madoff was charged [...]

In shopping for the best rate and lowest closing costs on a mortgage, the idea of low to no-cost loans capture the attention of even the most skeptical of borrowers. Advertisements abound with promises of no points and there is a lot of advice out there encouraging people to pay as little as possible toward [...]

Recent News On HR3915 To Outlaw YSP, Among Other Things
If you follow the mortgage or real estate markets at all you’ve probably heard about HR3915, the new proposition to, among other things, outlaw Yield Spread Premium (YSP) in mortgage transactions. If you haven’t heard about it, just do a Google search on HR3915 and you’ll [...]

A while back I wrote an article about paying points to refinance and why, even though we tend to hate the idea of upfront costs, it can be a huge benefit in the long run. In that article I said that you’d benefit from paying points upfront “when the cost of the buy-down pays for [...]

Why in the world would anyone want to pay $10,000 to refinance; especially when there are all kinds of lenders advertising “free” loans? Well, because the idea of a “free loan” is a little misleading and lenders use this to their advantage when advertising these programs. If the idea of paying closing costs makes you cringe, you need to read this.

So in the last installment, Rate Shopping – The Story of the Too Low FICO, we went over how rate shopping can hurt your FICO score. We went over the one way to shop for a mortgage and still save that FICO score of yours from dropping like a rock. Now we’re going to talk about a simple concept that my grandma taught me, and I’m sure she’d like me to pass it on. What is it?

You get what you pay for.