Hello Friends! For those of you that had Spring Break this past week with your kids, I hope you had a great time and enjoyed your week. Also, my prayers and thoughts go out to our brothers and sisters in North Dakota and pray for their safety and relief from the floods and disaster they are dealing with. Those times of tragedies and life events certainly puts things in perspective when we complain about the economy or financial matters when people's lives are at stake for our neighbors in another state. As far as the market goes last week, is there really hope on the horizon like we all have been hoping for? It sure feels like things are changing for the positive. With the DOW making some progress gaining back some of the ugly losses from the first quarter, inflation appears to be stable with the personal consumption expenditure report that came out Friday as well as the Fed's intervention on buying billions of dollars worth of treasury notes and mortgage bonds last week. Due to lender and investor capacity issues, I continue to see interest rates for mortgages all over the board depending on where you check. I was able to lock over a dozen clients last week with rates in the upper 4% range with an APR under 5%! Even the most conservative financial planner I work with pulled the trigger and is refinancing his own personal home mortgage right now. With that, I have to agree with him and his decision and reason to take action now rather than hope for something better to come in the coming months. There are several technical factors and economic pressures to support why mortgage interest rates can't go lower than they are currently, outside of another drastic move of the Fed announcing they are going to print another trillion dollars to buy more mortgage backed securities and treasuries. I truly feel we have hit the floor on interest rates. A few quick reasons why I think this mainly come down to pending inflation with the trillions in new government spending and the value of "long term money". For a 30-yr mortgage to drop to 4% or lower, this would smash the yield curve or return on "short term money" which would destroy the value or reason to offer short term loans such as auto and personal loans when inflation starts rearing its ugly head. Plus, we have to remember, never before have mortgage rates been this low. We unfortunately have the "cry wolf" effect on all of the advertisements we have heard over the years on the radio, TV, internet and mail that mortgage rates are at or near "all time lows!” Well, we truly are at all time lows. If you were to look at the history of and the conception of mortgage loans on a home, which began less than a hundred years ago, never have they been in the mid 4% range. There are so many junk fees and third party fees now in a refinance, I have to agree with so many of my clients that the fees and costs are way too much. The bigger and more important question is, what is the alternative, do nothing? As I was explaining to a client this morning, as hard as it is not to focus on the "start line" and the initial expense of a refinance, we MUST focus on the finish line because we could miss out on a huge opportunity with that line of thinking of being too focused on the initial costs. A quick example, a client was recently balking at the amount of fees associated with a refinance and considered not taking action and staying "as is" to save the "costs" of refinancing. When I broke things down and simplified things to show the monthly interest savings divided into their closing costs, it was easy to see how soon they would recover their costs and it became an easy decision. http://wealthcreationteam.ning.com/video/travis-video-mortgage-and-7