Back in the blogging saddle

It's been a nice break getting to know my little man and settling the family into a new routine. Personally the 2:30am feeding could take a hike but it lends a good excuse to sleep in until 7:30. I did return to work within a week of being home but I don't recommend working up a good faith estimate while doped up on Vicodin. I had been tossing around the next subject for my comeback until I read this article in today's Oregonian. I find it extremely one sided and have a running list of arguments against... drum roll please... Oregon Senate Bill 965! My only thought at this moment is "Uh, What?!"

Don’t make the same mistakes I did…

I don't spend money on advertising but rely 100% on referrals. I have posted my services on Craigslist for a couple of years now, one because it's free and two I was angered by the many misleading ads I had come across. This following post always generated a lot of interest so I thought I would share an excerpt on my blog...

I can remember the day my husband and I bought our first home. It had been a few months since my husband had gotten out of the Navy; he was stationed in Long Beach, California, which is no place to raise a family. So we moved back to Oregon, we stayed with his Dad until we could find a place of our own. You might know that place, a crappy little apartment on a busy street where the rent was only $435/month. It was temporary so we could save up for that big purchase. We saved a little and we searched a lot. We finally found it, the perfect house; we now were going to have a back yard in a quiet neighborhood for our little girl to play in with the puppy we were going to get. We were so excited! I also remember signing the stack of papers, I worked in the loan department at the bank I thought I understood enough to know that we were doing the right thing and that it all looked good on paper. What I don’t remember was our loan officer’s name, who he worked for, or how much money he made off of us. About 2 years later my husband got a great job offer with another company so we sold our little home and relocated to Eugene. This time with two little girls and a little more money than the last, thank God for equity. We could now get a bigger and newer home, even more exciting! We had been writing that monthly check to pay the mortgage so we were experts, right? With yet another loan officer we secure a mortgage, I do at least remember her name and who she worked for. She was nice and explained a little more to us than the last loan officer, we felt confident it was a good loan. I remember her using words like par and points but I never really understood. I was afraid to ask because here I had worked at the bank for the last 2 years and I should know what she meant. Well, the little girl is now a teenager with a cell phone and eyeliner, the second daughter is now the middle, and puppy is no longer. It took a relocation back to Portland, another mortgage, and more time spent working in the loan department; but it wasn’t until becoming a Loan Officer myself that I truly understood what she meant. I wish I still had the closing statements from our first 2 purchases so I can see what not knowing really cost us. It’s true, ignorance is bliss and hindsight is 20/20, but knowledge is power.

The ever changing mortgage landscape

Some large lenders are rolling back their Alt-A products as liquidity remains an issue on the secondary market. In the short term borrowers are going to find themselves paying higher prices on sub-prime loans or simply out of the market if they can't qualify for that altruistic prime niche. Seeing that the sub-prime market has remained intact, be it is without the 100% financing down to a 540 credit score, I can only speculate that the sub-prime markets will see the need to become more competitive and will look to expand their portfolios to include these former alt-a borrowers. The result leaving only a shift in definitions rather than a cluster of home buyers high and dry. Half empty or half full?