“Who owns my mortgage?”

It’s a frequently asked question, and the reason is always the same: A change is needed. Someone is trying to refinance the mortgage, or is trying to save a house from foreclosure, among possible scenarios.

Finding the answer to this question has become extremely important to many homeowners, but especially those in financial trouble. The many programs designed to stem the record tide of foreclosures have different requirements, depending on where your mortgage ended up after you signed that huge stack of papers at settlement.

For example, if your mortgage is guaranteed by Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae or insured by the Federal Housing Administration and you are looking to modify the loan, you should check out the government’s Make Home Affordable Program or the Home Affordable Refinance Program.

If it isn’t, you might have an opportunity to modify your mortgage through your lender if it participates in the public-private Hope Now program.

Or, if Congress eventually passes a plan to refinance through the FHA those mortgages not guaranteed by Freddie or Fannie, as proposed in the State of the Union address by President Barack Obama, the resulting program could provide a solution.

No matter who owns your mortgage, the company that services it might change several times during the life of the loan. This is a normal process and should not affect the terms and conditions of your original agreement.

Nor should you be angry or offended if the loan is resold. If you pay your mortgage on time every month, you’re fine. It’s nothing personal; just business.

These days, very few mortgages are kept in portfolio by the originating lender. Loans are sold to the secondary mortgage market, where they are packaged as securities typically purchased by several investors.

The process is designed to quickly return the money to the lenders, at a profit, of course, so they can lend it to more homeowners.

“Mortgages are a commodity item nowadays, like eggs or lumber,” said Holden Lewis, a columnist with Bankrate.com. “They are graded at the source, then packaged and sold.”

“When the supermarket buys a truckload of eggs, the manager knows that all the eggs didn’t come from one farm, and that some of them already are cracked,” Lewis said. “But the manager has a pretty good notion of the value of a truckload of eggs.”

About 50 percent of U.S. mortgages are currently held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and about 30 percent are guaranteed by FHA.

Typically, Fannie and Freddie take single-family (one to four units) and multifamily mortgages and pool them into mortgage-backed securities. Some are backed by fixed-interest rates, others by adjustable rates.

Until recently, mortgage-backed securities were prized by investors because of borrowers’ historically low default rates. In addition, large pools meant that the risks were spread widely.

One the reasons given for the excesses of the housing boom was that the default of loans given to risky borrowers would be lost in a pool of “good” loans. There were just too many “bad” loans made to allow that to happen.

Investors, or groups of them, that buy Fannie and Freddie mortgage-backed securities receive a guarantee that “we will supplement amounts received by the trust as required to permit timely payment of principal and interest,” according to Fannie Mae.

In addition, the more loans that are made, sold and packaged, the lower the risk and the cost of borrowing.

The lender can service the mortgage—collect and process your monthly payments—or sell the servicing rights to another, who is paid a percentage of the interest payment as compensation.

The servicer is the mortgage company handling the day-to-day tasks associated with managing your loan.

The difference for borrowers is this: If the lender is also the loan servicer, any decision on changes to the mortgage can be made directly. The servicer of another’s loan must get the originating lender’s approval first.

The easiest way for a borrower to determine ownership of a mortgage is to contact the servicer to see if it and the lender are the same.

To find out whether a mortgage is guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac— the key to some modification and refinancing programs—go to the place on their websites providing that information.

Fannie Mae’s is http://www.fanniemae.com/loanlookup/. Freddie Mac’s is http://www.freddiemac.com/avoidforeclosure/—under “Tools and Resources,” click on “Loan Lookup.”

Then there’s something called MERS, the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, which tracks the identity of servicers that registered loans on its system. For more information, go to http://www.mersinc.org/homeowners/.

by rismedia

In a double surprise, the job market may at last have begun to revive, but the double-the-forecast, 243,000-job surge in January has done little harm to mortgages. We are still near 4 percent; with 10-year Treasury notes up from 1.82 percent but holding nicely at 1.95 percent.

Ordinarily a payroll jump like this would have killed us, especially in combination with strong results in the two Institute for Supply Management surveys for January: manufacturing to 54.1 from 53.1 in December, and the service sector way up to 56.8 from 52.6 last month.

Some of the calm reaction in markets is suspicion -- few other data confirm a big economic turn. Europe is a continuing cause of deep anxiety, but quiet this week, nothing but the muffled clanking of picks and shovels in the bottom of its ever-deeper hole.

And housing hangs over everything in the U.S. economy, all measures of prices in continuing decline through December.

But, to his great credit, President Obama devoted a speech this week to housing, including new proposals. "This housing crisis struck right at the heart of what it means to be middle class in America: our homes." Right!

The proposals will be without effect, but that's not the president's fault. That two years have passed without proposals or priority or even mention -- that is his fault -- but give him full praise for saying out loud: "Hey, there's an elephant in this living room!"

Why there are no effective proposals, and why it's beyond even the president's power to put them forward, is a tale of human nature. We know perfectly well what to do, but several things in ourselves and our political process prevent action.

Federal housing finance agencies created in the Great Depression were by far the most effective aspect of the New Deal, perhaps more so than all the rest put together. Aside from restoration of credit, the miracle of government guarantee made mortgage lending easy as apple pie.

Guarantee and uniform underwriting standards -- sound ones! -- made previously illiquid and expensive mortgages as easy to transfer as shares of stock, and cheap, long after the Depression was gone.

For good or ill, as early as the end of World War II our homes became the stores of our national household wealth -- got to put it someplace. Stock market guys would like it to be their market, but it has its own epic instability. Houses it was.

The original stop-the-Depression charter of the mortgage agencies became ordinary "everyday, everybody" utilities. We let them bloat, from 1985-2004, for the interest of their stockholders -- an inherently unstable situation.

Even before mortgage credit went bonkers, around 2002, and the push for homeownership ran beyond qualified candidates, the ease of mortgage finance had likely overfed housing wealth.

Here, in the aftermath of the bubble, it is convenient to have someone to blame for our pain. "Fannie and Freddie" have become curse words. Profanities.

They were not responsible for the $2 trillion in toxic loans, but they are big, fat targets for the right who hate all government, and also, oddly, for the agencies' boosters on the left. Hell hath no fury like a social engineer scorned.

The truly culpable parties -- Wall Street bankers -- have made a clean getaway. John Dillinger and Clyde Barrow would still be in business if they had gone to Princeton, gotten Master of Business Administration degrees, and learned to lie properly.

The result is self-inflicted paralysis. The plain-sight truth: For housing to recover we must reactivate Fannie. In a time of falling collateral value, private lenders cannot lend, and we must rely on government guarantee.

That's as certain as the pope's religion, and behavior by bears in woods. However, reactivation is impossible without leadership to explain what happened and what did not, and that rhetorical task might be beyond Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself.

In every financial crisis, senior bankers have been available to explain and structure recovery, but this time the bankers' conduct before, during and after has been so without conscience that it may be another generation before financial-market pooh-bahs can earn back trust ... if they tried, which they have not.

The politicians are prisoners of a homicidally angry people, and we're going to stay in this pickle until we get over it.

The turn in these ISM surveys may be even more important than the often-revised payroll survey.

by Inman News

The list of housing markets showing measurable improvement expanded by 29 metros in February to include a total of 98 entries on the National Association of Home Builders/First American Improving Markets Index (IMI), released today. Thirty-six states are now represented by at least one market on the list.

The index identifies metropolitan areas that have shown improvement from their respective troughs in housing permits, employment and house prices for at least six consecutive months. The February index adds some metropolitan areas that have been particularly weak; this is due to the fact that the IMI measures improvement from a bottom, and some of the hardest hit markets are showing signs of coming off of extreme lows. Keeping this in mind, notable new entrants to list in February include Miami, Fla; Boston; Detroit; Kansas City, Mo.; Portland, Ore.; Memphis, Tenn.; and Salt Lake City.

“The number of improving housing markets has risen for six consecutive months, and 36 states now have at least one metropolitan area on the list,” noted NAHB Chairman Bob Nielsen, a home builder from Reno, Nev. “This indicates that despite the many challenges that continue to drag on a housing recovery – including the tight lending environment for builders and buyers – improving conditions are slowly but surely spreading from one housing market to the next.”

“While many of the markets on the February IMI are far from fully recovered, the index points out where employment, home prices and housing production are no longer retreating and have held above their lowest recession troughs for six months or more,” said NAHB Chief Economist David Crowe. “This is a sign that a large cross section of the country is starting to turn the corner as local economic conditions stabilize.”

“The fact that there are nearly 100 markets now on the improving list shows that the momentum is building for a housing recovery and that more buyers and sellers are starting to feel confident enough to return to the market,” said Kurt Pfotenhauer, vice chairman of First American Title Insurance Company.

The IMI is designed to track housing markets throughout the country that are showing signs of improving economic health. The index measures three sets of independent monthly data to get a mark on the top improving Metropolitan Statistical Areas. The three indicators that are analyzed are employment growth from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, house price appreciation from Freddie Mac, and single-family housing permit growth from the U.S. Census Bureau. NAHB uses the latest available data from these sources to generate a list of improving markets. A metropolitan area must see improvement in all three areas for at least six months following their respective troughs before being included on the improving markets list.

Seven markets dropped from the NAHB/First American Improving Markets Index in February as they experienced softening house prices. These metros include San Jose, Calif.; Washington, D.C.; Kankakee, Ill.; New Orleans; Worcester, Mass.; Jackson, Miss.; and Sherman, Texas.

A complete list of all 98 metropolitan areas currently on the IMI, and a separate breakout of metros newly added to the list in February, is available at: www.nahb.org/imi

by RISMEDIA

Every home—whether it’s a resale or new—has some kind of an issue, and the reality is that there is no “perfect” house. Many homebuyers embark on their search for a home with the belief that new homes should be flawless, when this is never actually the case.

Problems are found in all homes, but the issues with new homes are totally different than the defects found in resale homes. When evaluating a resale home, most problems are often related to older systems that are near the end of their service life. On the other hand, problems in new homes typically involve incomplete work, damaged systems, missing pieces of key materials and imperfect workmanship.

Unfortunately, many people who purchase new construction homes put a lot of trust in their builder and opt not to perform a home inspection. REALTORS® can help their clients take a proactive approach to identifying underlying problems in new homes by recommending a reliable home inspection company that goes beyond the basics to provide thorough home inspections that catch even the smallest of problems. Hiring a home inspection company prior to the closing of a new home can help save homebuyers money and prevent headaches due to unexpected home repairs down the road.

New home construction problems primarily fall into four categories:

1. Incomplete work: Many new home construction projects aren’t completed properly. The incomplete work may be as simple as a layer of paint on a wall that was accidentally skipped, or a room that has no air ducting. In many cases, the unfinished or imperfect work isn’t detected until the homebuyer moves in. A home inspection company will uncover these issues prior to the move-in date.

2. Damaged systems and finishes: Homes often incur damage during construction as a result of rain, snow, impact damage and stacking and storage damage. An example of this is ducting that gets compacted under attic insulation.

3. Missing elements: Oversights during construction due to human error are more common than many REALTORS® and homebuyers think. For example, the construction team may have forgotten to install insulation in the attic. Taking a proactive approach to identify issues before moving in can prevent costly problems that could arise in the future.

4. Imperfect or sloppy workmanship: While perfect workmanship is ideal, it’s nearly impossible. In reality, any number of things can go wrong on the construction site of a new home. A contractor could get delayed by work on another site and has to hurry to finish the current home he’s working on; rain and other elements can damage a home before it’s closed in; tradesmen could be diverted to another site, etc.

Other common problems with new homes include interior and exterior finish issues, tile and floor damage, water damage, buckled siding, roofing issues and structural problems. All new homes should be inspected to uncover possible defects. Knowing upfront what issues might arise in the future can save homebuyers thousands of dollars in the long term. The most reliable way to uncover problems is by hiring an unbiased third-party home inspector.

by RISMEDIA

Learning to taste fine chocolate is both a skill and a pleasure that allows you to savor the distinctive personalities and subtle flavor differences of gourmet chocolate.

When tasting, under ideal conditions, the chocolate should be at a temperature between 66-76 degrees F. The texture should be smooth with no noticeable grain, and the taste should be slightly bitter, but not acrid.

The technique for tasting chocolate is similar to that of wine-tasting; you want to take note of the color, aroma, flavor, and finish. The chocolate should have a rich, glossy appearance with no fat bloom (which is white streaking due to improper tempering). It should break with a crisp snap.

Begin tasting by placing the chocolate on your tongue and hold it there for a few seconds to experience the base and primary flavor notes. To release the secondary flavors, expand the chocolate's surface area by chewing five to 10 times. Let the chocolate melt slowly by pushing it gently against the roof of your mouth. The chocolate should feel pleasant in your mouth and linger on your tongue.

As you refine your palate, you will be able to discrimate between the slight flavor variations due in part to the origins of the cocoa beans.

Steve Laning, director of technical services for ADM Cocoa's North American Chocolate and Cocoa Development Center, says that the experience of tasting chocolate can translate into a travelogue for some. "Consumers eating chocolate today have a connection to a faraway place, the environment," he said. "Chocolate has the ability to transport us to exotic places."

Most of us have dreamt of having a vacation home. It could be on the beach in New England, somewhere tropical, or even somewhere foreign. Many consumers don’t realize that with the proper research, their dream vacation home might actually be in reach. Instead of visualizing how relaxing vacations and weekend getaways could be, why not try to make your second home a reality?

The first step to purchasing a second home is organizing your finances to make sure you can afford it without compromising the security of your other assets.

These tips can help you assess whether or not you are ready to invest in a second home.

1. Figure out what you can reasonably afford by looking closely at your income, savings, and spending habits. Future expenses need to be factored into your budget, such as the likelihood of replacing a car or adding to your family.

2. Check each of your three credit reports well before you start looking at houses or shopping for lenders. If your credit score needs improvement contact a credit counseling agency or ask your mortgage company for advice.

3. Create a budget. A budget not only clarifies your current financial situation, but it also helps you identify places where you might cut back to save for a down payment.

4. Consider tax implications. Purchasing a second home has its benefits, but you should make sure you consider funds for property taxes on the second home as well as additional income tax if your home will be rented out. You should research the area’s property taxes because some locations have significantly higher or lower property taxes.

If your research proves you are not quite ready to start looking for your vacation home, try not to get discouraged. It’s better to wait than to put your financial security at risk. If you feel that you are financially stable enough to take on a second mortgage, now is a better time than ever because interest rates are extremely low. Good luck!

by RISMEDIA

Energy-efficient windows can help you lower heating and cooling costs while making your home look more attractive. If you are planning to install new energy-efficient windows in your home, there are three factors to keep in mind: frame, glass and installatio

First, the frame can be constructed out of a variety of materials, including aluminum, vinyl and wood. Aluminum is not a practical choice in most areas because the metal conducts temperature and can fluctuate between hot or cold; however, because of its durability, aluminum may be the best option in coastal areas or rainy climates. Vinyl is inexpensive and practical, but may be limited in choice of color. Wood-framed windows provide the best insulation, but they require more upkeep than aluminum or vinyl.

When it comes to glass, the most often selected option is an argon-filled, double-paned window with Low-E glass. To understand a window's performance, check its energy-efficiency label. The "R" value is the measure of how well it prevents heat from passing through; it ranges from 2.4 to 4.5, and the higher the better. Conversely, the "U" value measures how much heat actually passes through and this number should be low.

Finally, if your windows are not properly installed, they will not perform effectively so be sure to hire a reputable professional.

Apologizing isn’t so much an art as a sport. When approached as a skill to build, governed by a few simple rules, the apology almost always achieves its goal—despite any fumbles during delivery. When it’s over, everyone wins.

Degree of difficulty: Medium to hard, depending on aversion to eye contact.

1. Forget dodge ball; apologizing is a contact sport. “Eye-to-eye, face-to-face, that’s the one way it works,” said Maribeth Kuzmeski, author of “The Engaging Child” (Red Zone Publishing) and “The Connectors” (Wiley), both relationship skills books. “My son, when he was younger … (would) write a note of apology. We would say, ‘We’re so happy you took the time to write us this note. We’d really like you to talk to us about it.’”

Now, her kids and their peers apologize by text message. “That seems to be accepted. Apologies are situational sometimes. But, as a parent, if my daughter apologized by text message to me, I would say, ‘Are you kidding me?’ Teenager to teenager may be one way, but teen to adult or adult to adult, if you really mean it, you go face-to-face and suck it up.”

2. Find a segue. Rolling into the apology is often the toughest part, especially if the tone up to now has been light. Kuzmeski suggests a transitional, “Hey, I wanted to talk to you about something.” That signals the subject matter is important. Next you might say, “I know you were unhappy with something that I did, and I’d like to talk to you about that.”

3. Include the “I,” as in “I’m sorry,” not just “Sorry.” The latter is the equivalent of “Love ya!” versus “I love you.” It’s often employed by kids who feel justified in what they did. “We need to teach, if something they’ve done has upset the other person, and they don’t want the person upset, then they say an authentic apology,” Kuzmeski said. “Hopefully we can get to the point where they’re sorry for what (the misunderstanding) has done, if not sorry for what they’ve done.”

4. Don’t qualify it. Banish the “if” and “but,” as in, “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings but your outfit reminded me of dad’s Naugahyde recliner.” Those qualifiers/justifiers will bury a deeper hole. If you can’t apologize without them, don’t apologize.

“We have to apologize in a believable way and not have any other messages intertwined in there,” Kuzmeski said.

If you’re unclear of your offense, however, it’s OK to say, “I see I hurt your feelings. I don’t completely understand. Can you tell me what you’re feeling?” If there was a misunderstanding or oversensitivity in your view, mend the fence with, “I didn’t know it would make you feel the way it did or I never would have said it. That wasn’t my intention. I’m sorry.”

5. Don’t expect instant absolution. “You want the other person to tell you it’s OK. And they may not do that,” she said. Perhaps your apology lacked conviction; you may wish to reiterate how sorry you are and add, if it’s a personal relationship (not business), “Will you please forgive me?” If the person replies, “Stop apologizing—it’s over already!” do stop. The person may just need time.

The apology under duress: Kuzmeski condones requiring a child to apologize, a la, “If you want to do whatever the next thing is that you want to do, you have to apologize to your sister.” “If you wait until they really feel sorry, you might be waiting 10 years,” she said. “What’s more important is to get them to know that apologizing is the right thing to do. It’s social intelligence type of teaching.”

How to receive an apology:
You don’t have to say, “Oh, that’s OK.” Especially if you’re still sore. Kids are known to fire back at an apologizer with “Well, I don’t forgive you!” A more mature alternative: “Thank you for apologizing.”

by RISMEDIA

You've likely seen television commercials recently about investing in gold. You also may see gold as a symbol of wealth, beauty or power, but what else do you know about it? Here are a few facts about the precious element that may surprise you:

• The United States pours more steel in one hour than the volume of gold poured in recorded history.
• Experts believe that as much as 80 percent of the gold on earth is still in the ground.
• About 75 percent of all gold ever produced has been extracted since 1910.
• Because it's so pliable, one ounce of gold can be stretched into a thread 50 miles long.
• The biggest nugget of gold ever found was discovered just two inches below the ground in Australia in 1869.
• It measured 10 by 25 inches, and yielded more than 2,000 ounces of pure gold.
• From 1933 to 1974, private ownership of gold was illegal in the United States.
• The chemical symbol for gold is Au. It comes from aurum, the Latin word for gold.
• An atom of gold has 79 protons, an equal number of electrons, and 118 neutrons.
• The first documented discovery of gold in the United States was in 1803 in Georgeville, NC.
• Most of the gold mined in all of history is still in circulation.