As regulators crack down on shady lending practices, banks and lending institutions are getting more and more rigid with loan qualifications. In fact, a recent New York Times article detailed one retiree’s struggle to obtain a mortgage even with excellent credit history and healthy retirement and brokerage accounts. In addition to demands for the usual read more »

The state of homeownership in this country is an interesting one right now. With home prices rising at a rate that hasn’t been seen since the boom several years ago, demand is strong while supply is lacking. The market would appear to be healthy, rebounding well, however, there’s a hitch; for a prospective buyer, rising read more »

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a government agency, recently released the nation’s largest public database of federal consumer financial complaints. This database includes details about more than 90,000 individual complaints on five types of products and services: consumer loans, bank accounts or bank services, mortgages, credit cards and student loans. The majority of complaints, read more »

The government continues to crack down on mortgage schemes today with news breaking that federal prosecutors have sued Bank of America, accusing the massive lender of carrying out a fraudulent home loan program. During the financial crisis, prosecutors say that BOA deceived the government by selling poor loans, without revealing the quality of the loans, read more »

California may have some of the best homeowner state law protection in the country after last week’s introduction of the new legislation the Homeowners Bill of Rights. It was a win for struggling homeowners who praised the new laws in CA attention to lender misconduct over the past few years. The homeowner state laws 2013 read more »

Recently, we’ve talked a lot about the hard costs of owning a home. We’ve discussed the costs of borrowing money from the bank, interest rates, mortgages, second mortgages, and the varying value of your investment as the housing market declines and recovers. When faced with the unfortunate prospect of foreclosure, these hard costs are often read more »