| Home loan refinance goes terribly wrong
Q: I have been frantically searching for help regarding my refinance five months ago. I specifically asked the loan company for a fixed-rate mortgage with no prepayment penalties, with payments between $1,300 and $1,500 a month. My loan officer said that it would be possible. A week later, I received documents from a bank for an interest-only loan with a prepayment penalty. I called the loan officer and he told me to disregard that because he was working on another loan that would be more to my liking. I ended up accepting an interest-only loan, because I was told that the loan I wanted would have insurance requirements. Before I signed the paperwork, I asked what I would be paying per month. The loan officer told me it would be $1,481. Great! About a month ago, I was looking at my payment receipts and saw a negative principal balance of almost $5,000.
Lenders' pitches aiming higher
Despite the mortgage meltdown, the blizzard of advertising for home loans continues.
With the subprime market in tatters in the wake of record defaults and foreclosures, fewer pitches scream "Bad credit? No problem!" Instead, lenders struggling to remain profitable are targeting people who have good credit and plenty of home equity.
With fewer homes being sold -- and, therefore, fewer loans taken out to finance purchases -- mortgage firms that have survived the subprime shakeout are focusing their marketing on persuading homeowners to refinance.
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Rate cut sparks rush to refinance mortgages
This is a great time for customers to achieve homeownership in a way that is sustainable for the long term." West Des Moines-based Wells Fargo Home Mortgage is part of Wells Fargo & Co., the nation's largest mortgage lender and the largest private employer in the Des Moines area.
In general, a mortgage is deemed "refinanceable" if it is 0.40 percentage point above current average mortgage rates. And the recent drops in mortgage rates could lead to the refinancing of as many as 7 million mortgages, or more than 70 percent of U.S. mortgages, according to estimates by Tony Crescenzi, a fixed-income analyst at Miller Tabak. David Motley, president of Fort Worth, Texas-based Colonial National Mortgage, which originates loans in all 50 states, is expecting an even larger applications surge this week and beyond.
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