Albert Hakim's (alwayssold) Blog

Roughly $146 billion in bank bailouts are not yet repaid to the Treasury Department as of the end of March, and the return on those investments remains "unknowable," according to the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. More than 550 banks have not repaid their bailout...

A federal court in South Florida charged nine people in three separate indictments for their alleged roles in a multimillion-dollar mortgage fraud scheme. The scheme involves inflated mortgages tied to high-end properties sold in the Versailles development in Wellington, Fla. The U.S. attorney's ...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Thursday to align their guidelines for servicing delinquent mortgages. Previously, the government-sponsored enterprises maintained different requirements for how their mortgage servicers would treat these loans. But the FHFA f...

A frequently asked question is whether a mortgage borrower receives any benefit from paying before the due date. In most cases, the answer is "no," but there are a few exceptions. With simple-interest mortgages, including HELOCs (home equity lines of credit), it does pay to pay early and, under s...

It's curious how companies promote the launch of a new product or program but do little to inform consumers when it is no longer available. Financial Freedom Senior Funding Corporation was founded in 1996 in Irvine, Calif., and grew to be of the biggest players in the national reverse mortgage in...

The bailout programs used to prop up the nation's banking system are now in the black. The U.S. Treasury announced this week that the investments it made in banks, beginning in 2008, to prevent the sector from folding under the weight of the financial crisis have now turned a profit. Three more f...

The nation's largest mortgage servicers foreclosed on 95,067 homes during the fourth quarter of 2010, a 49 percent drop from the number of completed foreclosures during the previous quarter, according to a new report from two regulatory agencies. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC...

Large banks and thrifts foreclosed on 382,000 homes in the third quarter, a 31.2% spike from the previous quarter, according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Foreclosures increased 3.7% from a year ago, and more are coming. There are 1.2 million homes in the foreclosure process a...

The percentage of mortgages classified as seriously delinquent within the portfolios of large banks and thrifts fell in all four quarters of 2010, the Office of the Comptroller of Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision said Thursday. The percentage of seriously delinquent mortgages at Dec....