Mortgages Blog

If you have a mortgage, you know your lender requires you to pay for property insurance until the loan is paid in full. But do you know what happens if your coverage lapses or if at some point the lender decides you don’t have sufficient insurance? The lender buys insurance on your behalf and charges

More than 230,000 mortgages began the foreclosure process in January, a 28 percent increase from December.

The government has made it easier and cheaper for borrowers who have a Federal Housing Administration mortgage to refinance their loans at lower rates through the FHA streamline refinance program. About two million to three million borrowers will be eligible to refinance through the program, according to estimates by the administration. President Barack Obama said

At the beginning of the housing crash, it seemed as though luxury homes might be spared the worst of it. But the latest Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices show that in many metro areas, prices are stabilizing among cheaper homes but still falling in the high-end real estate market. So far, according to Smart

Want to buy a home for half the price? Move to Milwaukee. No? How about Philadelphia or Boston? Bank-owned homes in these three metro areas sold with an average discount of more than 50 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011. That’s compared to the price of nonforeclosure homes that sold during that period, according

A few weeks ago I told you if you wanted to get a Federal Housing Administration mortgage, you should get moving to avoid higher mortgage fees. I hope you didn’t ignore my advice, but if you did, here goes your second chance to save money. The FHA says that on April 1, it will increase

Beginning April 1, borrowers will pay more for upfront mortgage insurance from the Federal Housing Administration, or FHA. Fees were last raised in April 2011 and are at the highest in the FHA’s history. Premiums for the insurance will rise from 1 percent to 1.75 percent of the base loan. The FHA estimates the increase

Our Spocs know “the financial situation of  the borrowers better than their spouses,” says Mark Atencio, senior vice president for mortgage servicer Green Tree Servicing. “They are that close and interacting that much with the borrower.” Do you feel that close to your Spoc? I guess I need to tell you who Spoc is. A

Carrying a mortgage is no easier on America’s middle class, even though home prices have dropped dramatically, according to a new study by Center for Housing Policy. Nearly a quarter of 45 million households in the study spent more than half their monthly budget on housing costs in 2010. The author of the study, Laura

While state attorneys general and lawyers for five of America’s largest banks basked in the spotlight of their $25 billion federal-state legal settlement over botched mortgage modifications and bungled foreclosures, a troubling report on recent foreclosure fraud quietly slipped under the public radar. The San Francisco county audit that examined about 400 county foreclosure sales between