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Tag Archives: Lien Strip

Lowest mortgage rates in history fail to help housing market. 11 million houses are worth less than what is owed on them and 15 million are unemployed. HARP refinance program a failure.

USA Today on September 29, 2010 set forth the grim numbers in a report by Paul Wiseman and Stephanie Armour. "Anemic demand continues to hamper real (economic) growth, " says housing analyst Robert Andrews of IBISWorld. "The housing market needs to find its true bottom before things can finally turn around."

Home sales were thought likely to strengthen after a terrible summer. But the housing market was barely registering a pulse even after 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages hit a record low 4.32% earlier in September. This does not bode well for anyone who is hoping that their home equity appreciation may offer a financial rescue.

Nearly one in four homes with mortgages are underwater – more is owed on the houses than they’re worth reports Wiseman and Armour.

They report that the 2009 Obama HARP program (Home Affordable Refinance Program) has not been effective. Under HARP, homeowners can refinance even if their mortgages are 25% higher than the value of their houses. However, two requirements hold back the success of that program. First, their mortgages must be guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, and the homeowners must be up to date on their monthly payments. Federal Housing Finance Agency director James Lockhart III predicted in 2009 that HARP could help up to 4 to 5 million homeowners lower their monthly house payemnts. The program has not been effective, as only 380,000 ho
homeowners had refinanced through HARP by the end of June 2010. Note: HARP is different from a loan modification under HAMP. The programs are different.

Wiseman and Armour report that Amhearst Securities analyzed several reasons for the failure of HARP, including (1) homeowners with negative equity are struggling to come up with the funds to pay the closing costs of the new mortgage (2) the mortgage industry laid off many people and cut positions and thus cannot cope with the small surge in HARP refinance requests and (3) mortgage servicing companies are reluctant to handle home loans originally underwrittenby lenders that are now out of business.

As reported in USA Today September 29, 2010. (USA Today publishes selected articles online so I apologize that it seems no link was available to the September 29, 2010 Wiseman/Armour article "Mortgage rates fail to motivate".

IDEAS FOR ACTION: Mortgage rates have already popped up since the 4.32% low earlier this month. DO refinance now and specifically insist on the HARP program, but avoid the temptation to pull home equity out to pay credit cards and other bills if you do have any home equity. If your home equity is less than $125,000 you may be able to refinance to a lower mortgage payment and soon thereafter reduce your credit card burden with a Chapter 13 0% interest repayment plan or a Chapter 7 wipe-out of credit card debt. Do not be afraid to ask relatives and friends to help you pay closing costs associated with an HARP refinance. As cynical as it may seem, consult with a bankruptcy attorney about surrendering your "underwater" home and then buying another one in a year or two that is "right priced" to the market so that you are not paying forever on negative equity.

Mortgage modifications failing, meeting only 16% of intended goals, says NY Times

NY Times columnist David Streitfeld reports that the dropout rate from the Making Home Affordable Program (HAMP) is very high. 96,000 trial modifications were canceled by the lenders in July 2010. The number of canceled trial modifications now exceeds 616,000.

Those numbers are leading some housing experts to call the program, which modestly rewards lenders for modifying mortgages, a failure.

About 422,000 mortgage modifications overseen by the government were considered permanent as of July 2010, up from 389,000 in June. But the pool of candidates is shrinking rapidly. Only 17,000 trial modifications were started in July, down sharply from the 150,000 enrolled in September 2009 when the program was new according to a report by NY Times columnist David Streitfeld.

After reviewing the new data, Calculated Risk, a popular financial blog, wrote, “Those borrowers are still up to their eyeballs in debt after the modification,” and many will default again.

“My concern is that if we have another protracted housing dip, it’s going to bring the economy down.” Mr. Feder, chief executive of the real estate data firm Radar Logic explains, saying that he expects prices to ‘get whacked’  in the Fall of 2010.

“If consumers don’t think their houses are worth what they were six months ago, they’re not going to go out and spend money. I’m concerned this problem isn’t being addressed,” says Mr. Feder as quoted in the article by Mr. Streitfeld of the NY Times, published on Saturday, August 21, 2010.

10 Cents on the Dollar: How to pay off your home equity line of credit

NY Times columnist David Streitfeld’s article entitled, “Debts Rise, and Go Unpaid, as Bust Erodes Home Equity”, published in The New York Times on August 12, 2010, asserts that most investors expect less than 10 cents on the dollar for defaulted home equity lines of credit such as second mortgages.

“Lenders wrote off as uncollectible $11.1 billion in home equity loans and $19.9 billion in home equity lines of credit in 2009, more than they wrote of on primary mortgages, government data shows. So far this year, the trend is the same, with combined write-offs of $7.88 billion in the first quarter. Even when a lender forces a borrower to settle through legal action, it can rarely extract more than 10 cents on the dollar. ‘People got 90 cents for free,’ Mr. Combs said. ‘It rewards immorality to some extent.'” Mr. Combs is a realty lawyer in Phoenix, AZ, who tries to negotiate deals with home equity line of credit HELOC loans.

Utah Loan Servicing chief executive Clark Terry buys defaulted home equity loans from lenders, and reports that he does not pay more than $500 for any one loan, regardless of how big it is, “Anything over $15,000 to $20,000 is not collectible. Americans believe that anything they can get away with is O.K.”

The delinquency rate on home equity loans was an astonishing 4.12% in the first quarter of 2010, down slightly from the fourth quarter of 2009, when it was the highest in 26 years of such record keeping, according to Mr. Streitfeld.

Mr. Streitfeld reports that during the “great boom” homeowners nationwide borrowed a trillion dollars from banks, using the soaring value of their homes as loan security. With the money now spent, some homeowners cannot pay. Surprisingly, it seems that delinquencies on this type of debt is greater than all other types of consumer loans, including auto loans, boat loans, personal loans and even bank cards like Visa and MasterCard. Mr. Streitfeld cites info from the American Bankers Association on this point.

Ideas for Action: Is it time to contact your second mortgage company and negotiate–offering 5 to 10 cents on the dollar?