Home buying thread

Well time for naive me story.

We refinanced after two years in our house because we could go from 5% to 3.75%. I decided because it looked like banking with Wells Fargo was about to be more unattractive due to fees, and because I thought my debt would probably serve me better both economically and politically to stay semi-local, to go with a local Credit Union for the loan.

Of course, the Credit Union sells the loan immediately, as in they have the notification of it at the closing. I kind of expected that, but I assumed it would be sold to investors, not sold wholesale to a large bank that "was named as one of the biggest and worst off of more than 150 U.S. lenders which own nonperforming loans that equal 5 percent or more of their holdings." (Flagstar Bank - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). Not that shocking that the money ends up elsewhere, I guess, but a disappointment.

Then, I logged on to the CU"s online banking today to discover my mortgage isn"t listed on there at all, and at this point I"m calling two different departments to find out if it"s even going to show up. I have a lot of friends who bank with the CU and they"re all happy, but I don"t know if any of them have mortgages with them. I guess I should have asked more questions, but I guess I kind of assumed if I got a mortgage with them, then I would be able to use their website to manage the stupid thing. Hopefully I can, but not happy at the moment.

tl;dr: Trying to stay local with money isn"t all rainbows.

I"ve seen several people refinance to specifically get away from the mortgage company they are currently with, and unhappy with, only to end right back up with them when the loan is sold down the road at some point.

If you"re financing with anyone other than one of the 10-ish largest banks/mortgage companies, odds are decent that you are going to end up with one of them anyways within a few years. Seems like smaller local/regional banks and credit unions sell off loans pretty regularly.

Cad said:

The owner of the loan and the servicer of the loan are very different things. The local credit union who promises not to sell your loan may still have the loan serviced by one of the big banks. So your money would still go to the big banks.

FYI all loans are sold these days. They are packaged into securities managed by a trustee with 1-2 billion in mortgages. The loan servicers pay the trustee who disburses the funds to the various tranches in the security. You never see this part because you just pay the servicer.

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Yep, all that ^.

My previous mortgage went almost 10 years before getting packaged off and sold to some thumbdick on Wall Street. My current mortgage gets passed around like a drunk hooker at a frat party.

My loan was sold by the originator 2 months after I got it, then about a year later they bought it back. Nothing much you can do about it really.

There are times where it can suck however. For example, I was reading a thread on Fat Wallet about a guy who, after his loan got sold, started getting services charges for making bi-weekly and/or extra payments (when they didn"t charge him for those services with his old lender). Since there wasn"t any language regarding services charges for utilizing those "services" in the loan agreement, not much he could do about it.

Another guy had an issue where any time he tried to pay additional principle, even though he included specific instructions to apply the extra towards his principle, every month the bank would instead apply it to escrow. Every month he had to call and get them to apply the extra payment to principle instead.

So when your mortgage does get sold, be aware of little things like that.

Third property offer declined. This is more frustrating than I thought it would be, especially since we are looking at homes about an hour from our current location.

We"ve only been looking for 9 weeks or so, but I"m already starting to get to the point of "settling" for a home just to get this shit over with. Not good I know, but I"m impatient as fuck. Once I get it in my head to do something, I just go and DO it, but home buying doesn"t quite work like that /sigh

I got 5k for hail/wind damage to my roof and apparently have to mail the check to the mortgage company... is this something to be worried about?

Correct.. is there any reason they wouldn"t or is it some retarded formality?

You shouldn"t have any problems as long as your payments are up to date and you"re don"t owe them any fines or delinquent payments.

Basically, your mortgage company owns your home, just like a lienholder owns your car until it is paid off. An insurance company won"t make any significant payments to you(usually anything over $1000) without also including the mortgage company on the check.

Otherwise you could pocket the cash, and if the home foreclosed or something of that sort, the Mortgage Company could collect on the claim a 2nd time.

An insurance policy always has to pay out to ALL insureds on a policy(they usually just don"t bother for small amounts) but they wont want to take the chance of getting dinged twice on a larger amount.

Big Picasso said:

I got 5k for hail/wind damage to my roof

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Also a couple things:

Some mortgage companies won"t sign off until you have a contract in place for the repairs. They want to know you are actually fixing the damage on their investment.

Most people know this(but we run into a lot that dont), if your roofer/repair guy wants any money up front, don"t use him. Any legit roofing company that is local(not travelling around chasing storms) and worth a damn, has the means to order your materials and supplies and bill you when the job is complete. If someone needs money upfront its generally a sign that they are either shady, or pretty rinky-dink or new to the business. Avoid those people.

Got one good quote of 4900 today that almost eats my deductible... It pisses me off these guys just write 5700 on an invoice and it works out to 300 a square

Does anyone have any experience making a low ball offer on a REO or foreclosure property? I bought a house 2 1/2 years ago after making an offer of about 75% of the original asking price. After watching the market continue to drop I feel like I could have offered 50-60% and still had it accepted.

The market where I am seems to have finally bottomed out, and I"m looking on snagging another piece of property in the near future.

I found a house today that is listed at 119,000$, just reduced from 140,000$. It has an incredible amount of potential(unique style, fairly secluded) but I was only Pre-approved for 60,000....

I know it"s way out of my price range, but I figure it will need at least 30,000$ worth of improvements to be on par with the rest of the neighborhood.

Am I fooling myself, or has anyone seen or experienced success with this kind of lowball offer?

Maybe on some shithole that can"t be financed. I wouldn"t think its possible but they"re required to submit your offer and you"re not going to offend any foreclosure people... DO IT