General Consumer Articles: Weeks in Review March 29-April 19, 2009

I've been letting my weekly article review slide for several weeks due to one thing or another, during which time I've done a few important new articles and republished quite a few very important older ones. Therefore, I'm going to limit the review to three weeks and do so more catch up next time.

Newly Written Articles

Consumer Focused Carnival of Real Estate Once a month, I collect, talk about and link to consumer real estate articles.

Rental Fraud, Landlord Fraud, and Prospective Tenant Scams I don't have much to do with rental real estate, but this is a common fraud going around right now.

How Agents Should Respond To An Appraisal Below Purchase Price This is very important now with HVCC in effect.

Who Has A Legitimate Interest In A Real Estate Transaction? is a philosophy of real estate article, drawing a distinction between who has an interest worth the protection of others, and who's just working for a paycheck and therefore can walk away if they don't think they're getting a benefit.

Updated Articles

The Tradeoff between Rate and Cost in Real Estate Loans This is probably the aspect of mortgages least understood by consumers. You must understand this in order to understand mortgages.

Buyer's Markets

Loan Providers Offering to Pay For The Appraisal is a reprint of an older article, and with HVCC in effect, not as important as previously. Note that there is a difference between offering to pay, and being required to pay.

Why Renting Really Is For Suckers (And What To Do About It) is an important article - understanding the difference a couple of years more renting is likely to make to your financial future.

The Good Faith Deposit for Real Estate talks about the earnest money a buyer puts into escrow.

Developers and Incentive Money to Use Their Lender talks about ways to manipulate this system for your advantage

Competing Offers From The Same Agent For The Same Property

Disasters and the Mortgage talks about some of the hard truths of loan contracts.

What if Your Partner Refuses to Pay Their Share of a Loan or Mortgage (or Won't Pay on Time)? Once you are in this situation, you may be forced to choose between bad alternatives. The time to protect yourself is before it happens.

Option ARM and Pick a Pay - Negative Amortization Loans These have been regulated out of existence, and for good reason. But they might come back, so you need to be aware of the problems with them.

Discovering You've Got A Bad Loan - Don't Panic! Making the best of a sub-prime situation

Listing Agents and Pre-Approvals or Pre-Qualifications Pre-Qualification and Pre-Approval are bad jokes foisted on the public by listing agents who don't understand loans but are trying to play CYA in case the transaction falls apart.

Negative Amortization Loans - More Unfortunate Details More problems with this horrible loan.

Negative Amortization Loan Issues on Investment Property There really were potentially useful niches for this loan. But it was horribly abused.

Option ARMs and Cash Flow debunking one of the standard agent and loan officer rationalizations for putting people into this awful loan.

Should Negative Amortization Loans Be Banned? I didn't think so. I thought the way to fight misapplication of these loans was to insist on full and complete disclosure - something that other loans can benefit from as well.

Loan Qualification Standards - Debt to Income Ratio The more important of the two key measures for loan qualification, for the consumer as well as the lender. This measures "Can you afford to pay it back?" and most of the reason for the meltdown was in playing games intended to frustrate this key measure of loan qualification.

Loan Qualification Standards - Loan to Value Ratio talks about the less important of the two key loan qualification metrics.