Beginner's Information: November 2006 Archives

Every so often, someone who thinks they're a wit sends me a copy of The Rules For Relationships According To Women. Unlike those rules, which might have been funny around the time Nefertiti was a debutante, these rules are real and they are not based upon caprice.



Very recently, I was walking through a grocery store parking lot and heard someone screaming on their cell phone, "It wasn't my fault! The broker told me not to make that payment, and then they didn't pay the loan off on time!" Which leads me to Rule Number One: It is YOUR responsibility to make all payments on time. Nobody else. Your name is on that contract, not theirs. Under text that says essentially, "I agree to repay this loan on these terms." When you are in the process of refinancing, make it a point of paying that mortgage on time and in full. The worst thing that will happen is that you will get a check back a couple weeks later. Whereas if you blow the payment off, you are taking the risk, as happened to this person, that some incompetent person doing your new loan will not get the loan done in time to make the payment date. On the sixteenth, there's a penalty due. On the thirty-first day, it hits your credit, where it can conceivably make a difference of 150 points. And if the lender is getting ready to fund the loan the next day and runs your credit then and sees your drop, the terms of your loan just got worse, if they can fund the loan at all. It is the mark of a bad loan officer to tell you not to make your payments. A good one will specifically tell you to continue to make payments on time. I haven't blown a rate lock in a very long time, but there's always the possibility it might happen and the loan takes longer than I think it will. Don't let it happen to you. Make your payments on time, whatever you're doing.



Corollary to Rule Number One: You are responsible for getting it to them. All of this nice convenient stuff about mailing a check or sending the payment online is quite a convenience, but they do not legally have to do it. Your grandparents had to walk the check (or the money) in every month. You can still do this if your lender has branches and you suddenly remember on the 15th that you forgot to make your mortgage payment. Many lenders are very forgiving about this. But they don't have to be,



If that payment doesn't get made on time, it is your fault. End of discussion. If you mailed it off on time and it got lost in the mail, you are the one that owes the penalty. If you transferred the money online, and it somehow doesn't get credited to the right account, it is your fault. These don't happen often, but they do happen. The lenders are actually pretty forgiving about it, provided you can convince them that the payment was made. You have a receipt, a canceled check, something that says you made the payment in full and on time. If you're good enough about paying on time, sending the check on the first even though it's not officially late until the 16th, they're pretty forgiving about checks that get lost. On the other hand, if you are always paying on the last possible day, the lender is going to regard that late fee as the least they are due. While you are at it, always include something with your account number on it when you send the money. Write it on the check, include a coupon, put it in comments. Otherwise the lender could conceivably end up misapplying the funds of the check, especially if they figure to use the address on the check, and you're making a payment on another property. Most of the time they do get it right. But if they don't, it's your fault. If they get the payment with all of the necessary information and misapply it, that's their fault. If they didn't get it, on time or at all, or missing some important information, it's your fault.



There is no rule two, at least that I can think of right now. There is only one rule, but you violate it at your extreme disadvantage.



Caveat Emptor

I just moved into a rental house with an option to buy. I figure I can probably save up around $40-45k for a down payment in three years. how should i save? The Roth IRA tax loophole for first time home buyers maxes out at $10k and takes 5 years anyway. It sounds dumb, but the best safe short term investment I can think of is savings bonds. There has to be something better!

Your major constraints here are a relatively short time frame and you want a certain amount of safety. The idea of investing the money is that you want to get more money, not lose your investment savings.

So if you're going to move outside the realm of guaranteed investments for this purpose, you are going to worship at the altar of diversification. Stocks generally go up, but can go down (roughly 28 percent of all years since records have been kept), and indeed, are not anything like a panacea. Therefore, if you're going to risk the stock market or the bond market in order to obtain their higher returns, you're going to want to diversify, diversify, diversify in order to prevent anything short of a general market decline from ruining your investment.

With that firmly in mind, individual stocks are probably not a good idea. If successful, the idea is that the income will be mostly capital gains, which are taxes at a lower rate. Unfortunately for this idea, it's hard to get efficient and diversified individual stock investment for less than $100k. At $100,000, you've got a down payment to be extremely proud of.

The same with individual bonds to an even greater extent. When most bonds run in $10,000 to $50,000 denominations, diversifying is not really an option when you're just trying to save up for a down payment. If one of them suffered a significant downgrade, your price would take a hit.

Next on the list is government savings bonds and bank CDs. These offer a guaranteed return. The problems are that it's a mediocre return at best, and it's all ordinary income. Still, 5.5% or so for bank CDs is safe and secure, even if it reduces to about 4% after taxes. US Treasury securities have a four year minimum holding period to get their guarantee. Me? I stopped loaning the government money twenty years ago.

All of the various insurance products are a bad idea. You're saving for something you want within five years, not something forty years away or trying to insure a possible loss. Nor does the tax treatment help. Secure commodities investment is one of those oxymorons like plastic glass.

Finally, there are mutual funds. These are diversified by their very nature. In fact, my usual complaint is that they are too diversified, but in this case, that's actually good. Pick a good fund family that covers all of the major asset classes, including bonds. Yes, you pay management fees (and advisement fees or a sales load if you are smart, to help keep you from over-reacting to short term market events), but you can average nine to 13 percent per year, pretax, seven to ten afterward. A large portion of gains will be capital gains, taxed at lower rates than ordinary income. This isn't a certain or guaranteed investment, and can lose some of your principal, even all of it in theory. Nonetheless if you're comfortable taking what is in my estimation a small amount of risk, it can really pay off.

Caveat Emptor.

Veterans Administration, or VA loans, are government guaranteed loans available to veterans and active duty members of the armed services, that enable them to purchase homes for not money down. In fact, VA loans go up to 103 percent of purchase price to allow for some closing costs as well.



VA loans are a unique creature in the world of mortgages. Because there is a government guarantee on the loan, they are available, usually at the same rate, whether your credit is perfect or abysmal. They have a qualification limit equal to the conforming loan limit from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, $417,000 as of this writing.



Now, the Veterans Administration runs a website where you can get all kinds of information on VA loans, but I'm going to touch some high points.



VA loans are available both for purchase and for refinance. There is a streamlined program for pure interest rate reductions that can sometimes be at documents in as little as a week. This is called the Interest Rate Reduction Refinance Loan program, or IRRRL, but usually just called a VA streamline. There is, or so I understand, a cash out program as well, but I've never done one of those.



All VA loans have two important feature: Government Guarantee and Assumability. The government will guarantee a certain percentage (usually 25% of the original loan amount), which is more than enough to persuade most lenders that these are loans worthy of a fairly low rate, as they are low risk. A person with a VA loan can allow anyone else to assume it, with the approval of the lender and the VA. They have to prove they qualify for the loan, and the veteran still has some responsibility for the loan. Last I checked, prepayment penalties on these loans were prohibited.



Now the bad news. Even with the government guarantee, the rate/cost trade-off isn't the best. Most VA lenders want two at least two discount points for their VA loans, a fact which makes low cost and zero cost VA loans problematical. Even with those discount points, the rate will probably not be as good as A paper. Veterans with good credit, particularly if they have a good amount of equity or a decent sized down payment, will generally be able to obtain a better rate at a lower cost in the A paper marketplace. Even so called A paper "jumbo" loans over the $417,000 limit, or A paper "stated income" loans, will have a significantly lower rate/cost trade-off than the VA loan. They're better than just about all sub-prime loans, but they lose out to A paper.



If you have good credit but not much of a down payment, the VA loan can be an option worth exploring. VA loans have no mortgage insurance requirement (aka PMI), that purpose being served by the government guarantee, and so splitting your loan into a first and a second mortgage in order to avoid mortgage insurance, with the second being at a higher rate, is generally not necessary, and your full loan amount can be at the lower rate of the first mortgage. But be careful, because once again, most VA lenders want their two discount points, and maybe more. You might want to read my article on the Trade-off between Rate and Cost in Real Estate Loans and Why You Should Ignore APR for more as to why. Nevertheless, this could go either way and is well worth shopping the loan both ways.



If you have rotten credit, a VA loan can be the only way you can purchase a home, particularly if you have no down payment. Since credit is irrelevant and there's a government guarantee, I used to know a couple lenders that didn't bother to run credit for VA loans. Even the ones that do, it's just a checked box that plays no part in the decision making and underwriting process. Furthermore, you get a rate of a sort that would normally be available only to someone with a much higher credit score than yours.



Now in addition to relatively high closing costs, there are some other games that get played with Veterans Administration loans, of which the Rate Buydown is probably the most pernicious and widespread. But if you're one of those veterans who thought they could never be approved for a loan on a home, VA loans can make it happen where nothing else could.



Caveat Emptor.

after Katrina I am upside down with my mortgage.
my house is uninhabitable. My flood insurance check
doesn't payoff the mortgage. How can i get a short payoff
due to financial hardship - i.e. relocation loss of jobs and
steady income?

This is one of the hard truths about mortgages. They are a contract between you and the lender to pay back a certain amount of money that you borrowed in order to purchase that property. They have nothing to do with any unforeseen hardship, and if you do not pay that money back, in full and on schedule, you can anticipate negative consequences no matter how good the underlying reason. Especially to your credit, and those are going to be long term consequences indeed.

Now unforeseen disasters, like Katrina, Earthquakes, floods, fires etcetera, are one of the biggest reasons why things go wrong with your ability to repay that money. Something happens to the property and now you can't live in it, and you do need to pay for housing elsewhere. Furthermore, in widespread disasters like floods and earthquakes, since your job may no longer be there, you may have to relocate a considerable distance away in order to find work, and have difficulty paying your mortgage even if your property, in particular, came through just fine.

There are several issues that trap the unwary or uninformed consumer. Homeowner's Insurance in general is the first of these. Many lenders in other states have requirements that the property be insured for the full amount of all mortgages against the property. This requirement is illegal in California (and a few other states), and actually is counter-productive as this implies that the objective is to pay off the lenders, when the objective of insurance is to repair the damage. The phrase that California lenders look for in the policies of homeowners insurance that any lender can and all lenders do require is "Full replacement value." In other words, the insurer must agree to bring the property back to being in the same condition it was in prior to the covered event that caused the damage. Nonetheless, there are many properties where this kind of coverage is not available, most often due to their location in areas vulnerable to periodic fires. In such instances, you can expect lenders to require significantly larger down payments and charge higher interest rates, if they are willing to lend against the property at all. Since in the current "Everybody buys with 100 percent financing" trend this severely impacts your ability to sell your property, and therefore the value you will receive for it, you should be advised of the difficulty before you purchase the property, no matter how much you have for the down payment. An agent who doesn't tell you about this issue on properties where it is an issue is either incompetent, or not looking out for your best interest.

Another issue with homeowner's insurance is that you must keep the insured amount reflective of your home's current value. If you bought ten years ago here in San Diego, you probably paid about $150,000 for a three bedroom single family residence. I don't know of any single family residences below about $350,000 now, and most are in the mid 400s or higher. The insurance companies, quite reasonably I might add, take the position that even if you have "full replacement value" coverage, your home is only insured for $150,000, and is worth $450,000, you are not insuring it for the full value and will not pay the full bill for any repairs even if it is only for $100,000. In such a case, it's been a while since I went over the figures that are the legal basis for the math, but in this particular instance, I get that the insurance company will pay $41,666 out of that $100,000 repair bill in this particular instance. The threshold is legally if you had the property insured to at least eighty percent (80%) of its actual value, they will pay the full bill, but you only had it insured to 33 percent of the value, and therefore they will only pay 33/80ths of the bill. So once every couple of years (more often in markets rising 20% per year!) talk to your insurance company about making certain your property is properly insured. Yes, you'll pay more money, but it is a trivial amount compared to the cold hard fact above. My first property has multiplied in value by about three and one half times, and the difference between the insurance premium then and the insurance premium now is less than fifty percent. Now some insurers (mine among them) have a good record of not invoking the 80 percent rule I'm talking about here and paying the full amount, but this is a matter of company policy, not legal requirement, and it can be changed at any time and no matter how benevolent they are, if the disaster is bad enough they will have no choice. Furthermore, those folks who keep their coverage updated are de facto paying for those who don't under such a policy, and for those who do make a habit of keeping their insurance coverage updated may find more competitive rates with other insurers.

Two things everybody needs to be warned about is that no regular policy of homeowner's insurance, not even the vaunted H.O.3 policy with the H.O. 15 endorsement, covers against flood or earthquake. If possible flood or earthquake is an issue where you are, you need to buy a special policy to be covered by them. Flood and earthquake policies usually have a higher deductible than a basic homeowner's policy, and the reason for this is simple: solvency of the insurer and price of the insurance. Flood and earthquake are typically widespread devastating disasters that make for major damage over a widespread area. If the deductible was smaller, the price of the added policy would need to be much higher, as paying off such claims strains the financial resources of even the strongest insurer. Now if you're buying on stable soil atop the highest ridge line for miles around, flood insurance is probably not a worry for you. I sit roughly two tenths of a mile from a creek bed, but the amount of territory it drains is relatively small, only a of couple square miles, as the big watercourses go well away from where I sit and there are large hills between me and them. On the other hand, being in California, I've had earthquake insurance since the day I bought the property.

One more thing with flood insurance: There is a federally mandated thirty day waiting period between application and payment of premium and the time it goes into effect. This is to prevent, for instance, people in New Orleans waiting until there is a hurricane headed their way and rushing out and buying flood insurance, then canceling it and asking for a return of their premiums afterwards. I think the thirty day requirement is waivable to the extent that it can go into effect on the day you buy your property, but talk to your insurance agent.

Now, one final thing to be aware of. The value of the land itself is not insured, only the value of the improvements to that land. If a flood goes through your land, the land will still be there afterwards (and research riparian rights sometime if you're worried it will not be - another thing a good agent should warn you about if it's relevant). So if, like many in San Diego, you bought the property for $500,000, but it only cost the builder $200,000 to put the property together, the value of the land is obviously $300,000, right? Well, your mortgage is for eighty percent or ninety percent of the value of the improvements plus the land. Let's say 80%, $400,000, although I suspect that's on the low side of both mean and median. So when a disaster destroys the improvements (i.e. the home) and your insurer sends you a check to rebuild those improvements, that $200,000 check is obviously not going to cover the full amount of the mortgage. What do you do?

Well, that's where the importance of a good insurance policy, that will cover the costs of housing while you rebuild in addition to the costs of rebuilding the home in the first place, comes in. You'll also need to learn the value and importance of managing cash flow versus amount you may owe, but that's a subject for another essay and you should consult a good professional financial person if you haven't learned this before said happens in any case. Trying to learn that financial skill "as you go" is a recipe for guaranteed disaster. Furthermore, no matter how good your policy of insurance is, there is always a deductible and there are always extra expenses of rebuilding that you need or desire to undertake because it's the best and cheapest time to do so. This illustrates the value of building up and maintaining an emergency fund that you can access, because even if the finished property will be worth far more, no regulated lender will touch a refinance for cash out while the property is still under repair. A "hard money" lender might lend you new money, but they require so much equity in the property "as it sits right now" that this is not an option for the vast majority of all property owners. And in the meantime, you must keep up all payments required under the original loan contract you agreed to.

Caveat Emptor.

This is one of those commercial gambits I keep seeing that has nothing intrinsically wrong with it, and yet it is most often a tactic employed by the more costly loan providers. In short, sharks and scam artists.



The basic come-on is this: Loan provider offers to pay for your appraisal if you do the loan with them. They often use such come ons as "free appraisal!"



TANSTAAFL. Repeat after me. TANSTAAFL. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. "Free" stuff has an ugly habit of being the most expensive there is, and this particular come-on is no exception. Offer you a few hundred with the left hand while picking multiple thousands out of your pocket with the right. If you want to be an educated consumer, engrave TANSTAAFL upon your soul.



What's going on here is that they are trying to make it look like you're getting something free. You're not. They may front the cash for the appraisal, but in all but a few cases you're going to get explicitly charged in the end. Even for those people whose final loan papers does not show an appraisal charge, they are charging it to you somewhere else. Odds are that they're charging it about ten times over somewhere else. Either in origination or yield spread, one way or another you are going to pay for this appraisal. Actually, you are likely going to pay for that appraisal several times over. People are strange about cash. Many folks, if told they don't have to lay out $300 to $500 for an appraisal, will choose loan providers where the proposed rate is 1/4 to one half a percent (or more!) higher than competing loans, with closing costs thousands of dollars higher. They are getting the cost of that appraisal all right. In this scenario, they're making half a point to one point more than anyone else on the same loan, plus all of the extra closing costs. That's if they're a broker. If they're a direct lender, the difference is between a point and a half and two and a half points, more if there's a prepayment penalty!



Low cost loan providers do not pay for your appraisal. The loan providers who pay for the appraisal are paying not only for your appraisal, but the appraisal of all the people who cancel, and a good margin besides. Not to mention that this loan provider completely controls the appraisal, leaving them in control of what happens if you actually notice their huge fees when you go to sign loan documents, and decide you want to go somewhere else. This is one of the ways that loan providers avoid competing on price, by pretending to give you something for free. I say "pretend" because they are not giving you anything for free. I do not understand that normally competent adults who are well aware what "free" really means in other contexts will think it means they're getting a benefit. But just like the "buy one, get one free" offers that jack the price up threefold first, this is only a good bargain if the few hundred dollars it saves you stays saved, rather than giving you $400 with one hand while taking $6000 with the other, through higher loan rates and costs. Rate and cost trade-offs on real estate loans vary constantly. You can't know what the best bargain is right now unless you price it out right now.



Caveat Emptor.

"What mortgage fees can i recover after loan denial" was a search I got. The answer is basically, "None."



Indeed, one of your search criteria should be mortgage providers that don't charge anything up front, except maybe a credit check fee. Those are about $20, and you should be prepared to spend that $20 several times over while you're shopping lenders. If you're worried about twenty dollars when you are applying for a mortgage, chances are that you shouldn't apply.



Now many lenders want you to make a deposit that varies from a few hundred dollars to one or even two percent of the loan amount. Deposits are charged by lenders who want to get you committed to the loan, and they do it for at least two reasons. The first is psychological commitment. Usually when I mention things like that, I get people who immediately come back with, "Those kind of mind games don't work with me!" I'm not looking for an argument, and with most folks, I don't know their past history well enough to come up with an example, but this phenomenon is essentially universal as far as humans go, and those few not subject to it are probably suffering from some other more debilitating psychological problem. In fact, the normal progression of a loan is a series of commitments upon your part. The decision to talk to potential providers. The application.



After the application, lenders want the originals of your documentation and money. The original documents are requested so that you cannot shop or apply for a loan elsewhere. I, as a loan officer, do not need your original documents for anything I can think of at the moment. I need the original of the loan application and a couple other items you fill out with me, but not of your pay stubs, your taxes, your insurance bill, or any other documents you have pre-existing. Copies are just fine for any lender I do business with, so long as they are clean and readable.



The next step is to get money out of you. If all they want is the credit report fee of about $20, that's fine and normal. Credit Reports cost money, and if you're just shopping around, a loan provider has two choices: raise their loan prices slightly so that they charge those people who finalize their loans more, or charge folks whatever the cost is to run credit when they apply.



But many loan providers want more than the credit check fee. A lot more. They want a deposit that varies from several hundred dollars to one percent of the loan amount, even two percent in some cases. They might say it's for the appraisal, and usually at least part of it does go to the appraiser. Nonetheless, you should not give it to them. I've had my clients tell me about the tales they've been told, about how that money is to pay the appraiser. The appraisal should be paid for when the appraiser does the work. As I've said before, you want to be the one who orders the appraisal, and therefore controls it. I've had clients tell me about loan providers who only use "in house" appraisers. Well, those "in house" appraisers are drawing a salary and requiring "in house" appraisers is usually indicative of lenders who aren't competitive on price.



The reason they really want larger amounts of money out of you upfront is two-fold. First, it builds that psychological commitment I talked about a while back. Second, it makes you financially committed to a loan, which tremendously raises the level of psychological commitment. It means they've got some of your cash. Most people don't really understand loans, not deep down where it really matters. Consider, for a moment, which you would rather have: $400 cash, or a loan that costs $5000 less (not so incidentally making a difference of $25 on the monthly payment), but is otherwise identical. Dispassionately sitting there on the monitor in front of you, the choice seems obvious. You're going to have to pay that $5000 back sometime, and in the meantime you're paying interest on it. But move it to a situation where these potential clients have already put down a $400 deposit with an overpriced loan provider, and the vast majority of them won't sign up for my loan, even though I'm willing to guarantee my loan quote and the other company isn't willing to guarantee theirs. Why? Because they're thinking of that $400 in cash that came out of their checking account, not the $5000 in extra balance on their mortgage. Companies want that deposit to stop you from going elsewhere, to a loan provider that can do the loan (or, more importantly, is willing to do the loan) for much less money. Practically speaking, they're not only guaranteeing themselves a certain amount of money, they are guaranteeing that the client won't change their mind about their loan.



So do you get it back if the loan is denied? Nope. At least I've never been told about an instance where it happened. That money was a good faith deposit. Legally, it was an incentive for that loan provider to do the work of that loan, all of which costs money. Provably costs money, I might add. The loan processor doesn't work for free. The underwriter doesn't work for free. The escrow officer doesn't work for free. The appraiser doesn't, the title company doesn't. Nobody works for free. Phone calls and copies and word processors to generate all of your documents from the title commitment to the loan documents. Some documents are the same for every loan and can be computer generated. Others, like the title commitment, require humans to enter literally everything on them.



Now, a deposit isn't necessary. In fact, you can find loan providers out there (I'm one of them) who routinely work the whole loan on speculation of it funding. They might ask you to pay for the credit report up front, but everything else is paid for as the work is done. You write the check to the appraiser when they do the work. You might ask the advantages to the consumer of this. That advantage is that these loan providers are not holding your money hostage. This means that if the loan falls apart because the loan provider told you they could do the loan and they couldn't, they're out the money, not you. This means that if you find a more competitive loan, there's no reason why you can't apply for that one instead. This means if your back up loan is ready to go and this one isn't, all you've spent is the $20 for a credit check. You're not out hundreds to thousands of dollars that were in the deposit.



So if a loan provider asks for a large cash deposit up front to begin the loan, chances are that you shouldn't give it to them. Particularly if they won't guarantee their loan quote, chances are they are trying to lock you into their loan by holding your money hostage, and when you discover at closing that they tacked thousands of dollars onto the loan charges that they conveniently "forgot" to tell you about or pretended didn't exist ("Escrow's a third party charge. We don't have to tell them about it until afterwards"), and now you are facing a choice between forfeiting your deposit and signing off on a loan that's not what you agreed to when you gave them that deposit. Better not to face that choice, by not agreeing to pay anything beyond the credit fee up front.



Caveat Emptor.

Just like "we'll beat any deal!" in any other competitive sales endeavor, this is a game. Actually, it's even more of a game for loans than it is anywhere else, used cars included. What they are hoping is that you'll go there last, and tell them what the best thing you've been quoted, and then they can sell you on their loan and most people will go with them, because "we're here, not there."



The first issue is that anyone can give a low quote. It's like the old joke, "Your lips are moving." Unless they guarantee that quote, that's all they're doing: flapping their gums. All a quote is is an estimate, and I've more than adequately covered the games it is legal to play with a Mortgage Loan Disclosure Statement (as the Good Faith Estimate is now known in California). By itself, A low quote means nothing. Loan officers can, legally, quote you one loan and deliver a completely different loan at a completely different rate with a completely different (higher, or course) closing cost. Without some kind of Loan Quote Guarantee, a quote isn't worth the paper a verbal contract is printed on.



The second issue is that even if they are quoting a loan they intend to deliver, unless they are quoting to the exact same standard, the quote game favors the lender who pretends third party costs don't exist, who pretends that you're not going to get zonked for the add-ons that you are going to get zonked for at the end of the process, the lender who quotes based upon a loan that you do not qualify for. Are you going to pay these costs? Absolutely. Would you rather know about them at the beginning, so you can make an informed choice, or get blindsided at closing (assuming you even notice)?



The third issue is that they are looking for safe harbor, and they're hoping you give it to them. If someone brings them everyone else's quotes, they know what everyone else has talked up, how big the lies are that the prospect has been told, and they just have to tell one that's a little bit better. This is trivial when you've got all that information you've been freely given. This is called false competition. You've metaphorically given them a mark, and told them to "tell a more attractive story than this one." Easy enough in a storytelling context - tell the same story with a little more sex - and even easier with loans.



A good loan officer has no need to know what quote you've been given to tell you what the best loan they can deliver is. Tell them to quote you the best loan they can without this information. Ask them if they'll guarantee that quote, because a quote that isn't guaranteed - as in they pay any difference, not you - is worthless. That's how you can choose the best rate that can really be delivered, not by allowing someone the advantage of knowing how much they have to lie to get the business.



Caveat Emptor.

Somebody asked, "What are my legal options when there's a change on a good faith estimate."



Short answer: Sign the documents or don't. Same thing with a Mortgage Loan Disclosure Statement here in California. Neither one means anything binding; that's why they call the one an estimate. Nonetheless, because there is a perception that they mean something, that people think the lenders are trying to disclose everything fully. The fact is that some are while others aren't, and there is no correlation with size of the lender, how well known they are, or even what the loan officer at the next desk over is doing.



The fact is that if the loan officer cannot persuade you to sign up, there is a guarantee that neither they nor their company will make anything. This creates an incentive to tell you whatever it takes to get you to sign up. Once signed up, most folks consider themselves committed or bound to that lender, and stop looking around.



But the only documents that mean anything, legally, all come at the end of the loan process. Note, Trust Deed, HUD-1. So you can see the motivation exists to pull a bait and switch, or more often just not to tell the whole truth. Nor will they point out the differences at closing from what you signed up for. That would get you upset to no good purpose, from their point of view. The fact is that a majority doesn't take the time to spot the difference, and of those who do, some just don't understand how to spot the difference. Of those who do take the time, and do spot the difference, most will cave in and sign just to be done with the process, and of course there are those who are trying to purchase who won't get it and will lose the deposit if they don't sign.



The fact is that these forms are estimates. They may or may not be accurate estimates. In some cases, the loan provider tells you about every single dollar you're going to need up front, in others they might as well be telling you the loan is going to be done for free at a rate two percent below any real loan out there. If they can't get you to sign up, they don't make anything, so the incentives are for them to over-promise and under-deliver. In other words, tell you about something better than what you'll end up with. Now the loan officers know what it's going to take to get the loan done - or they should know, anyway. But they often tell you a fairy tale that might as well begin "Once upon a time..." to make it seem like their loan is better than the competition, because if they can't get you to sign up, they don't make anything.



Now, the fact is that the vast majority of people out there go out shopping for loans in the wrong fashion. They find someone they think they can trust, because they are family, because they are the scoutmaster, or because they go to church with them. Exactly what type of loan will they deliver, and at what rate? With what costs? It is always a trade-off between rate and cost on any given loan type.



Even less likely to get a good rate at a decent cost are the people who do shop around, but won't give loan officers a chance to figure out what's really the best loan for them. The first group of people might stumble onto someone trustworthy who gives them a good loan at a reasonable rate for a reasonable cost; these people are going to fall for the biggest lie, because a loan officer can always tell you about a better loan than really exists and they are motivated to get you to sign up. They call around asking about the lowest rate or the lowest payment, and don't want to hear anything else out of the loan officer.



The fact is that it's going to take a good, in depth conversation about your situation for a loan officer to figure out the best loan for you, and you want to have that conversation with at least three or four loan officers. Why? Because the first one could have told you exactly what they thought you wanted to hear. Ditto the second. Keep going until you hear a couple of different suggestions. Furthermore, once they've given you their suggestions, ask about the other suggestions you heard in the past. Don't shop by lowest payment; that's a good way to get stuck with an abomination like the so-called Option ARM or another loan type that you don't want. Don't shop by interest rate alone, because you'll get stuck with a loan that has six points and you'll never save enough money on the payments to recover those sunk costs. Shop by the trade-off between rate and cost, because there always is one.



Now at the end of the process, the lender has all the power. You need or want this loan, and they're the ones with it ready to go. In the case of a purchase, you've got a deposit you're going to lose and a home you wanted that you won't get if you don't sign the loan documents. If you sign the documents, you are stuck with the loan, that probably isn't on the terms you were originally told about. I pointedly did not say "promised" because the earlier forms are not promises unless somehow guaranteed, and very few loan providers guarantee their quotes. Chances are, if they won't guarantee their quotes, they are not telling the entire truth about the loan they are telling you about.



The most important question on this page of Questions You Should Ask Prospective Loan Providers is "If I say I want this right now, will you personally guarantee this rate with those closing costs, and will you cover the difference (if any) between the quote and the actual final cost?" You won't get a flat "Yes." If you do get a flat "yes", they're making a promise on something that is not under their control, and I wouldn't trust it as far as I can throw an aircraft carrier. What you're hoping for is something like "Subject to full underwriting approval, yes we will guarantee this quote as to rate, type of loan, and total cost." This is a simple sentence that makes a specific guarantee subject to a reasonable condition, as loan officers never know if a prospective borrower is intentionally hiding or shading something at loan sign up. If you get a response full of nonsense about how long they have been in business, how they honor their commitments, or any such equivalent claptrap, then they are trying to buffalo you. None of the stuff when you initially inquire about the loan is a loan commitment in any way, shape or form. I'd rather have a higher quote that was guaranteed than a lower one that wasn't, and I strongly suggest you adopt that attitude as well. For an illustration as to why: If the quote is guaranteed, there's no incentive to stick you with a rate an eighth of a percent higher so they can make a little more money - they're going to have to make it good. There's no incentive to pad the closing costs with junk, because they've got to turn right around and give it back to you. If I offered you a choice between two envelopes, one transparent where you can see the $100 bill (guaranteed), and the other one opaque where I told you there might be anywere up to $110 in it (not guaranteed), which envelope would you choose? The same thing applies to whether the loan is at 6.5 percent with no points and no more than $3400 of closing costs guaranteed, or 6.375% with no points and no more than $3000 of closing cost, but not guaranteed. From my experience, the first quote intends to deliver a better loan than the second quote.



So (if you can't find someone who guarantees their quotes) how do you force the loan provider to deliver the loan they told you about in the first place? You can't. But you can give them a better reason to do so, if you have more than one loan ready to go. This gives you a third option. Your options are not limited to signing the first set of loan documents they put in front of you. You can sign the others. More to the point, because there is another loan ready to go, you can use that fact to negotiate a better deal - one that more closely adheres to what you were told about in the first place. If provider A won't do it, provider B will. If one of the two providers won't move, then the other one is likely to get your business. If the other provider gets your business, the first provider makes nothing. If they will give you the better loan, that's what you want, right? Keep in mind that if either provider actually provides the loan they talked about in the first place, you are miles ahead of the game. But this puts the power to control the transaction where it belongs, with you.



Now the loan provider is going to make money, or they won't do your loan. Judge loans by the benefits and costs to you, not by how much they loan provider is making, or whether they even have to disclose it (brokers do, direct lenders do not). The important thing to you is that you were delivered a thirty year fixed rate loan at 6.5 percent without paying any points, as opposed to 6.625% with one point and higher costs, not that loan provider had to tell you they made $4000 by doing it while loan provider B doesn't have to tell you anything. Sounds obvious, but I have seen people who chose the higher rate at more cost for the same loan, even stuck themselves with a prepayment penalty where my loan had none, because they thought I was making too much. In point of fact, I would have made a fraction of what the other guy did make, and therefore, by the only universal measure, I performed work work considerably more valuable to my client. So don't shoot yourself in the foot like that.



Now expect to spend a little bit extra (about a $100 retyping fee, if you're the one who orders the appraisal and therefore controls it) on the second loan. That $100, together with the extra time you spend getting the other loan through, is the best, cheapest, most cost-effective insurance policy you can buy anywhere for any financial purpose. It will not indemnify you for your losses, but the odds are overwhelming that it will certainly keep you from losing several times as much, by giving the loan providers a concrete incentive to deliver the best loan they really can deliver. From my experience, and that of my clients who have brought me more horror stories than most folks believe, I would judge it unlikely that either loan quote will be as good as the loan the loan provider originally talked about, unless one company or the other guaranteed their quote, but with another loan ready to go, chances are you'll get something a lot closer to what they talked about in the first place. Even if you can find a loan provider who will guarantee their quote, a backup loan is a really good idea, because going to court to force them to deliver is costly and time consuming, and you need that loan now. The existence of the other loan is an excellent reason to actually produce that loan they talked about way back on day one, with the initial Good Faith Estimate or Mortgage Loan Disclosure Statement.



Caveat Emptor.

Got a search for "mortgage closing documents do not sign changes."



Unfortunately for this person, the documents you get at closing are what legal folks call a contract of adhesion. This means you can either accept it, sign, and adhere to all the terms as presented, or you can walk away. Basically your choice is to take it or leave it, in exactly the form presented.



Now on those rare occasions someone actually has the intelligence and good sense to walk away from a situation where the terms have been changed, the prospective loan provider does have the option of offering you a better deal as incentive to do business with them. Like, say, the loan they originally talked about to get you to sign up with them. Mind you, they don't have to, and the costs of that other loan may mean that they would rather do no loan than that loan.



Now I'm not a lawyer, but the way contracts of adhesion were explained to me is that if there is any legal ambiguity, it will be interpreted in your favor. This doesn't mean you can claim you thought it meant something different than the average person would understand; this means that if there is a legally ambiguous wording that could legitimately be interpreted two different ways, and you and your lender disagree as to the meaning, the courts will generally rule in your favor. Once again, the law is different from place to place and the courts have the final say; check with your lawyer.



Now in the loan world, it is much more common than not to be offered a loan contract at final signing which differs in some material form from the loan terms that were described to you in the beginning. The loan provider will generally offer you a loan of the same type, and usually at the same rate, but most often the costs to get that rate will be significantly higher than were listed on the Mortgage Loan Disclosure Statement (Equivalent to the Good Faith Estimate for the other 49 states). Neither one of these forms is in any way, shape or form a legal commitment, nor are any of the other forms you get at the beginning of the loan process, such as the Truth In Lending Advisory.



The only thing that means anything is the loan contract, or Note, that you are offered at the end of the process, together with the HUD-1 form, which is the only accounting of the loan required to be correct and complete.



Now the difference between the initial teaser loan they talked about and loan contract they actually got approved is one of the reasons why the less than ethical providers out there often want a cash deposit for the loan, particularly if their rates are not particularly competitive and they know it. If they're nervous someone will come along behind them and offer you a better deal, they want a cash deposit so that they still get something if you pull out, and many folks obsess about the cash deposit to the point where I could offer them a deal that saves them several times the cash deposit, and they still wouldn't switch. This isn't to say not to pay the twenty dollars or whatever it costs them for the credit report, this is to say don't deposit the appraisal fee (several hundred dollars, which should be paid at point of service) or even part of a point "to be refunded if the loan funds" within a certain amount of time. Chances are the loan isn't that great, particularly not the real loan they are really going to offer, and that's why they want to lock you in by having something to hold over you if you don't sign on the dotted line at the end of the process.



Caveat Emptor

I keep getting hits for this, so people must want it explained. Loan Amortization is nothing more than the process of paying the loan off by regular payments over time. Leave it to the experts to come up with a fancy word for an everyday process, eh?



A loan which is fully amortized (or fully amortizing) is one which the required payments will pay it off in full by the end of the term of the loan. Fixed rate loans are the classic example of this. A thirty year fixed rate loan has 360 payments of equal amount, at the end of which the loan will be paid off, assuming you have made all the payments on time. The last payment may be somewhat smaller due to the fact that they may round the payment up to the next penny, and over thirty years it makes a difference.



However, most hybrid ARMs are also fully amortizing loans. The difference between these and the fixed rate loan is that the rate, and therefore the payment, is fixed only for the first few years, and after that the rate varies based upon an underlying index. Nonetheless, the loans are still calculated to pay off the entire balance by the end of the loan. You are welcome to keep them after the fixed period if you want to, but few people do.



Balloon loans are partially amortized. Their payments are calculated as if they were a longer loan than they are. Because they amortize based upon a longer loan period, the regular payments do not pay the loan off in its entirety by the end of the loan. Unlike the hybrid ARM, these loans are over in a shorter period of time, and you do not have the option of keeping them. You must either pay the loan off, whether by paying it or by refinancing, or sell the property.



I don't see it in a federally approved list of loan terms, but I have heard interest only loans called delayed amortization. These loans, whether fixed rate or hybrid ARM, have interest only payments for a given time, and then amortize over the remainder of the loan. For instance, a five year interest only loan is then paid off (amortized) over the remaining twenty five years of the loan. Note that when they start to amortize, they will then have payments that are higher than the equivalent fully amortized loan, because the balance is paid off over a shorter period. They will also typically carry a higher interest rate (most subprime lenders charge 1/4 percent higher interest rate for an interest only loan, and there are additional limitations on availability).



If there were such a thing as an interest only loan that stays interest only until you refinance, it would be an unamortized loan. Years ago, I was invited by a company to take a seminar because they offered these to financial planners clients. Fortunately, when I checked NASD regulations, I found out that what they were trying to sell was prohibited. The interest rates they were talking about were very high as well. The reason I said "fortunately" about finding out NASD regulations prohibited what they were doing is that I later found out that they were a scam and shut down by the regulators. I might have found out had I done all my due diligence, or it's possible I might not have. Either way, I'm glad I didn't have any clients with them.



Finally, there is the negative amortization loan, where if you make the minimum payment your loan balance actually increases, effectively digging yourself deeper into whatever hole it was that motivated you to do it. There are circumstances where they are the best thing to do given the situation, but in my opinion, (at least for owner occupied property) it should be a temporary solution of last resort.



Caveat Emptor.