Tue, March 10, 2009
For buyers in the most expensive housing markets, the rules concerning “conforming” mortgages have been confusing over the last year or so. Conforming mortgages are eligible to be purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-run companies that together own or guarantee most home mortgages. One benefit of a conforming mortgage is the all-important interest rate: mortgages whose values exceed a specified amount are not conforming and typically carry interest rates that are ¾% or more higher than conforming mortgage rates. Read the full article
Tue, February 17, 2009
The final version of the 1071-page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is due to be signed by President Obama tomorrow. My summary of the bill's key tax items two weeks ago was not far off the mark, but there are a number of nips and tucks in the final version. Read the full article
Mon, February 02, 2009
As promised, the House and Senate have been busy working on The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which includes several tax law changes intended to boost the economy. Read the full article
Tue, November 04, 2008
With so much attention being given to the $700 billion bailout of banks and the financial industry in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, not much has been said about the individual income tax provisions included in the massive 440-page bill passed last month.
If you'd like to avoid searching the full bill for the parts that might be personally relevant, here's a quick summary of some provisions that could be interesting to you even if you're not an enormous bank.
Read the full article
Sat, July 26, 2008
The Senate bill passed today provides aid for homeowners on the brink of foreclosure, relief for beleaguered mortgage finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and something else: tax breaks for first-time homebuyers and a deduction for homeowners who normally aren't able to itemize their deductions.
Read the full article
Fri, July 11, 2008
Many homeowners struggling to keep up with mortgage payments are probably using their credit cards to make ends meet. Now, apparently, people who can't pay their mortgages have a new alternative: they can charge their monthly mortgage payments to a credit card directly. I wish I were making this up, but I'm not. Read the full article
Thu, June 26, 2008
Over the last fifty years, suburban neighborhoods outside of cities grew for a variety of reasons: families wanted more space than city homes provided, urban crime rates were higher than now (peaking in the 1960's and 70's), and the idealized vision of suburban life grew in popular imagination to become a mark of prestige. Less consciously, perhaps, suburban living was enabled by cheap gas and good roads; the "driveable suburb" within striking distance of city jobs became the ideal place in which to build a home. In the 1948 film, "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House," Cary Grant played an advertising executive whose family flees its cramped New York apartment for a country home in Connecticut. For Jim Blandings, trains enabled the commute; that wasn't the case for most workers who decamped from the cities. The ability to drive to and from work relatively cheaply made the suburban "dream house" possible. Read the full article
Mon, June 23, 2008
One of the consequences of the subprime debacle is a sharp rise in foreclosed properties. Some areas are especially bad off; in May, the majority of homes sold in the Sacramento area were foreclosures. Foreclosures nationwide were up 48% in May vs.the previous year (RealtyTrac.com), and in Massachusetts they were up 32% (ForeclosuresMass.com) over the same period. The rate in MA would have been higher but for a new law that went into effect May 1st, forcing lenders to delay foreclosure proceedings by an additional 60 days. There seem to be quite a few ads claiming that great deals are available through foreclosure sales. Is buying foreclosed property a "can't-fail" way to make money? Read the full article
Tue, June 10, 2008
In the Boston area – and probably elsewhere – residential contractors are looking for work. For most of the last 20 years, and especially in the last decade, it’s been hard to find contractors willing to do small renovation jobs, but with the slump in residential construction, there appears to be window of opportunity. Read the full article
Tue, May 27, 2008
Mark Twain is credited with saying a great many things that he may or may not have actually said. Among these is the observation that "People commonly use statistics like a drunk uses a lamp post: for support rather than illumination." If Twain did say it, he might have had housing statistics in mind. If you pay attention to news reports, you're likely to hear widely-varying assessments of the state of the housing market. Who's right? Read the full article
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