For the third week in a row, mortgage markets improved early in the week, only to give back the gains before Friday's close. Mortgage rates ended last week exactly where they started. However, if you locked your mortgage rate Tuesday, you got a rate decidedly lower than someone who waited until
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04/20/2009
With respect to housing data, news is rarely positive or negative on a universal level. There's always two perspectives to consider, after all. The home buyer's perspective. The home seller's perspective. Usually, when data is beneficial to one group, it's less beneficial to the other. This is t
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04/20/2009
Since 2007, foreclosures have dominated real estate news. You can't turn on the news or open a paper without some foreclosure-related story. But for all of the discussion, foreclosures continue to be geographically concentrated. Adding up the latest stats from RealtyTrac.com, more than half of
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04/20/2009
It's Tax Day today and who among us doesn't love a legitimate tax deduction? The IRS expects to process 138 million tax returns this year and accompanying those returns will be a melange of tax deduction requests. Most will be run-of-the-mill including such staples as mortgage interest, vehicle
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04/15/2009
Shopping for low mortgage rates is a game of luck. Some days, mortgage rates are favorable. Other days, they're not. And while you can sometimes make an educated guess about where rates might be headed, you're not always going to guess right. Even the experts get it wrong more often than they'
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04/15/2009
For the second week in a row, mortgage markets started the week strong and then ended with a fizzle. In the holiday-shortened week, rates were exactly flat overall. There wasn't much economic data to move rates last week, incidentally. The market's up-and-down action was largely based on two eve
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04/15/2009
When conforming mortgages adjust, they're often tied to an interest rate index called LIBOR. LIBOR is an acronym for London Interbank Offered Rate. But what LIBOR stands for isn't as important as the role it plays. LIBOR is an interest rate at which banks borrow money from each other. Therefore
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04/10/2009
There are 138 million taxpayers in the United States and, according to the IRS, 20 percent of them file their taxes within 7 days of April 15. In a holiday-shortened week, that means that 27 million people had better get a move on. And while a portion of this year's last-minute filers wi
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04/10/2009
There are 138 million taxpayers in the United States and, according to the IRS, 20 percent of them file their taxes within 7 days of April 15. In a holiday-shortened week, that means that 27 million people had better get a move on. And while a portion of this year's last-minute filers will file
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04/10/2009
