Tag Archives: mortgage
Mortgage Acceleration Can Be a Strategic Investment
Paying off your house quicker than originally planned is definitely a good idea. But if you think of your home as a way to increase your wealth, that is even better.
Owning a home automatically creates a form of savings for you, but owning a home and using the equity to increase your wealth is a better idea. It is not hard to do. And though it can result in the same advantages that a professional investor has, you do not need to know the complicated strategies they do. It just takes the following two steps.
1. Use the equity you already have in your home to work in your favor. You can use it to pay down the principle of your first mortgage, which accrues on a daily basis, and then get it back into your equity loan before interest accrues on it. This will do two things, drastically reduce the amount of interest you would pay on your home, and also significantly decrease the time it would take you to get out of debt.
2. After using a method like this to substantially reduce the time it takes to pay off your mortgage, you can then have whatever time is left to put into some account that bears interest for you, instead. It takes the money you would have used to pay off your house-and would have only made money for your bank-and puts it into your savings account.
When you think in these terms, you not only avoid paying large amounts of interest to the banks, but you can also begin to use your money (much sooner than you would have originally) to begin earning compound interest in your favor. This is the business the banks are in, and they provide the tools you need to do the very same things. That’s their business! And you can have the same advantages.
Examples And Summary Of The Loan Modification Process (Page 1 of 2)
If you are trying to stop foreclosure, or have a mortgage payment that is too much, then you’ve probably thought about getting a mortgage modification. A mortgage modification is when the terms of a loan are permanently changed to allow a reduced payment.
The reduced payment is accomplished by either reducing the interest rate, lengthening the term, or lowering the balance to be more in line with the current market value. In most cases, a combination of all three of these choices are used to reduce the mortgage payment. There are other interesting options to reduce a payment with a modification too, but they all center around the term of the mortgage, the payoff, and/or the interest rate.
Here is an uncomplicated example of how a mortgage modification can lessen the payment, using each of the three options above.
Method 1 Dropping the interest rate
Lets assume the mortgage balance is $200,000 and the current interest rate is 7.75% and the payment amount is $1,750. Lets also assume this borrower has 20 years left on a 30 year loan. The borrower can no longer afford this payment because of a loss of income. They can afford a $1,250 payment, so the bank agrees to reduce the interest rate to a fixed rate of 4.25% for the remaining life of the mortgage. This will give them a payment of $1,240, without the need to lengthen the term of the loan or lower the payoff amount..
Method 2 lengthening the term of the loan
Lets use the same example above, only this time, we’ll assume the homeowner can afford a $1,500 payment. The loan amount will still be $200K and the interest rate will still be 7.75%. But in this case, the investor was not willing to reduce the interest rate. This happens very often, because the investors on the loan are not willing to accept a reduced rate. In this case, extending the length of the mortgage will make the payment affordable again and the investors will keep their 7.75% interest rate. The $200,000 balance is re-amortized over a 30 year period to get a reduced payment of $1,430. Everyone is happy because the foreclosure was prevented and the new payment is affordable.
Method 3 Dropping the payoff amount
In order for a payoff amount to be reduced, the value of the house must be less than the payoff amount. In a few cases, lenders will reduce the payoff amount without this stipulation, but it’s highly doubtful. To get the payoff amount reduced, you must give documentation to the lender that foreclosing on the house will cost more than dropping the amount owed to make the loan affordable again.
In this case, we’ll assume the home’s current market value has been established at $179,000, but the payoff is still $200,000. If the bank forecloses on the property and tried to re-list it, their estimated loses will be 30% of the home’s value. So after foreclosing on the property and re-selling, they will receive approximately $125,000, if they are lucky. Most lenders expect to lose 30%-60% on every foreclosure property, so this amount is being very generous.