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esquilax posted:Small update: "Third party" fees would have ran $1,500, so it just wasn't worth it. Thanks everyone.
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Jan 7, 2015 06:20
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Hey, is Lending Tree a good place to get a refi? I'm 4 years into a 20 year mortgage at 5.5%
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Jan 7, 2015 10:28
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Steve Yun posted:Hey, is Lending Tree a good place to get a refi? I'm 4 years into a 20 year mortgage at 5.5% I tried Lending Tree, but didn't have much luck. What I got was 6 months of constant phone calls from blocked numbered at lenders I had never heard of and no clear way to stop them.
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Jan 7, 2015 18:06
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eddiewalker posted:I tried Lending Tree, but didn't have much luck.
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Jan 7, 2015 19:50
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Steve Yun posted:Hey, is Lending Tree a good place to get a refi? I'm 4 years into a 20 year mortgage at 5.5%
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Jan 8, 2015 04:36
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swenblack posted:If you're at 5.5 and you don't have poo poo credit, any place is a good place to get a refi.
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Jan 8, 2015 06:12
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Potentially dumb/obvious question, but with the reduction in fha mortgage insurance premiums announced for 2015, would this affect existing fha loans as well? Checking to see if I should expect a lower monthly escrow.
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Jan 8, 2015 17:34
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No, the new announcement will have no effect on existing loans. I'm finally thinking about refinancing. I have a FHA loan @ 5.5% that I never refinanced because my MI is at .55%, and refinancing would have more than doubled the MI that wiping out a large chunk of the P&I savings every month. Coupled with never knowing if MI is going to be tax deductible the next year I never bothered. I still might hold off since if the right opportunity comes along we want to move, so I'm still not sure if refinancing would make sense if we won't live her longer than another year. Refinancing would save me about 150 a month right now though, so it seems like a no brainer tbh. We should also have no issues qualifying for a conventional loan now that my wife has been in her job for a long time, and our credit is very good.
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Jan 8, 2015 20:23
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I don't know what it is that curses the area I want to buy a house in, but there are a huge chunk of homes that are sitting on bad ground. Something about the geography and soil conditions causes things to slowly move in a part of town. Looked at once place that was even on moderately flat land today... lots of movement cracks and the wall is bowed out maybe 1-2" across 15-20 feet looking down the line from a naked eye. This one stretch had it bad enough where people had homes lifted, foundations jack-hammered out and re-poured. Lots of lawsuits.
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Jan 8, 2015 22:03
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dietcokefiend posted:I don't know what it is that curses the area I want to buy a house in, but there are a huge chunk of homes that are sitting on bad ground. Something about the geography and soil conditions causes things to slowly move in a part of town. Looked at once place that was even on moderately flat land today... lots of movement cracks and the wall is bowed out maybe 1-2" across 15-20 feet looking down the line from a naked eye. This one stretch had it bad enough where people had homes lifted, foundations jack-hammered out and re-poured. Lots of lawsuits. In Louisiana and SE Texas where I've lived the past 6 years, ground movement is the norm. If you ever drive in the part of the country, you will curse the roads. They aren't bumpy because we don't take care of them, they are bumpy because the ground is always moving. It's partly because the water table is so high, and the ground moves as the water levels change. And the fact that we have marshes and soft soil contributes to it. Having a house on cinder blocks or a pier and beam foundation makes it a little easier to correct for these changes in the ground. You can also pour concrete foundations that are so robust that they will maintain their geometry even when the ground softens/recedes under a certain part of it. Part of the challenge is knowing the limits of the ground you are building on. These people must have not.
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Jan 8, 2015 22:43
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dietcokefiend posted:I don't know what it is that curses the area I want to buy a house in, but there are a huge chunk of homes that are sitting on bad ground. Something about the geography and soil conditions causes things to slowly move in a part of town. Looked at once place that was even on moderately flat land today... lots of movement cracks and the wall is bowed out maybe 1-2" across 15-20 feet looking down the line from a naked eye. This one stretch had it bad enough where people had homes lifted, foundations jack-hammered out and re-poured. Lots of lawsuits. It's almost like the entire nation is built over an ancient Indian burial ground.
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Jan 8, 2015 23:58
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I got a letter from my insurance company saying they sent a stealth inspector to my house over christmas and are canceling my homeowner's policy because I don't have a handrail on my 24" rise, covered from the elements, front porch steps (not required by building code). They won't uncancel it even if I agree to install an ugly rail in front of my house, so now I get to shop for insurance all over again before I lapse and get force placed. Do never buy.
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Jan 9, 2015 01:06
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My heater stopped heating. The heater man came and took $450 and now my heater heats again. It was made in ~1977 or so and probably I should replace it, but probably I should replace the A/C at the same time, and we had an interesting conversation about permits and code. So the guy I use no longer installs new systems, he just does maintenance. I figured he was a good person to ask about the cost of a new system. He's local and familiar with the local prices for labor, and with the construction of my home. Basically lots of folks get a new heater, coil, condenser, and install for $5k using A Guy. In this case, no permits are pulled, they just do the work, and he said it's generally a crapshoot whether it'll be done well or poorly. On the other hand, pulling permits can mean a lot more money: not for the permit itself, but because the permitted work also has to be inspected, and inspections may reveal things like: oh, there's too much loss in the system, you have to replace all your vent work (and then get re-inspected). Or, oh, there's asbestos on your vents, which means you're actually exempt from having them replaced, but now that you know there's asbestos in your home you have to disclose that when you sell and that may hurt your resale value. He also said that in a seller's market like the current one, buyers don't give a poo poo about whether the work was permitted or even if it's to code; their main thing is "does this work" and if it works, you get the sale. Because buyers are desperate to close a deal for any reasonable price and can't afford to niggle about poo poo. On the other hand in a buyer's market, every little thing that's wrong, you'll have to fix or pay for, so having it done permitted and inspected etc. is a bonus. So at the high end, getting a company that is already bonded and licensed in my city and doing inspections and pulling permits and etc. the price could run to $10k. My guy says the sweet spot is probably around $7-8k, give or take. He also said there's no point going through Costco or Home Depot, because the discount on materials they give the contractors is negligible vs. the wholesale price contractors pay anyway. They might save $50. Whereas Costco takes a 17% cut of the sale, so that's 17% more the contractor has to charge to make a deal work through Costco, and he thinks Home Depot is similar. Soooo, long story short, that $10k in savings that I need to spend on a new electrical panel and wiring, and a new patio roof, and finishing the garage, and re-insulating the attic space, and landscaping, and remodeling the bathrooms, and remodeling the kitchen, and replacing the kitchen/dining room floors, and (in probably 5 years ish) replacing the roof, I also need to spend on replacing the 1970s furnace and A/C. Do Never Buy.
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Jan 9, 2015 01:31
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Leperflesh posted:My heater stopped heating. The heater man came and took $450 and now my heater heats again. It was made in ~1977 or so and probably I should replace it, but probably I should replace the A/C at the same time, and we had an interesting conversation about permits and code. Might be cheaper to just gut and renovate.
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Jan 9, 2015 02:29
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Leperflesh posted:My heater stopped heating. The heater man came and took $450 and now my heater heats again. It was made in ~1977 or so and probably I should replace it, but probably I should replace the A/C at the same time, and we had an interesting conversation about permits and code. I'm buying a 104 year old house and this is encouraging.
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Jan 9, 2015 02:37
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daggerdragon posted:Might be cheaper to just gut and renovate.
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Jan 9, 2015 02:39
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Leperflesh posted:
I have no idea if anything in my house is permitted. I just spent 10 minutes on my city's website and couldn't find anything. I'm just going to assume almost nobody ever wants to bother to get their HVAC work permitted.
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Jan 9, 2015 02:51
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daggerdragon posted:Might be cheaper to just gut and renovate. Definitely not. In my case, I have both a crawlspace and an attic space, and all the ductwork runs just sitting on top of the joists in the attic space (which is unfinished). It just has blown-in insulation, too. The wiring mostly seems to be runs in the attic and crawlspace, too. And the bathroom and kitchen remodels are not super urgent, so I'm planning to wait on those for probably 5+ years. So the main things are the stuff that's actually deteriorating or dangerous, and that's: the electrical panel work, the patio roof, the exterior paint, and in a couple years, the roof. I can't afford to do all those things immediately so we're prioritizing and that means probably the panel first. The deal with the heat and A/C is that we can keep spending money to keep them chugging along (we actually haven't had to pay a dime to keep the A/C working for 5 years but with something this old, it's on borrowed time) or we can pay for a new system that should just be trouble-free for a decade. This $450 I just spent is wasted if I replaced the system this year, but I don't think that's likely to happen, because it's keeping us warm/cold while the panel is actually not safe and the patio roof is leaking, which is destroying the joists that stick out of the garage roof. Citizen Tayne posted:I'm buying a 104 year old house and this is encouraging. My house was built in a working-class city in 1957, and sold for probably like $8,000. The A/C was probably added in the 1970s. These are simple houses, built with inexpensive materials but to a builder's quality that is better than the slapdash stuff developers throw up these days. It has a good foundation and the location (near BART in the SF Bay Area) is the majority of its value. Certainly not Victorian craftsmanship, but good enough as a starter home for me and my wife. A lot less time has gone by though, compared to your house. This house never had knob and tube, for example.
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Jan 9, 2015 05:41
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BEHOLD: MY CAPE posted:I got a letter from my insurance company saying they sent a stealth inspector to my house over christmas and are canceling my homeowner's policy because I don't have a handrail on my 24" rise, covered from the elements, front porch steps (not required by building code). They won't uncancel it even if I agree to install an ugly rail in front of my house, so now I get to shop for insurance all over again before I lapse and get force placed. Do never buy. Holy poo poo, I wonder if something came up on like a CLUE report after they issued the policy that showed a huge risk and they tried to use ANYTHING to get out of insuring your place. https://personalreports.lexisnexis.com/fact_act_property_claims/landing.jsp I'd pull that and see if anything pops up for your property.
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Jan 9, 2015 14:47
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How hard is it to call your agent and say switch all my coverage to a different carrier? I mean do you really want that company? How hard do you think getting a claim paid by them would be? Alternatively your agent can probably get the letter squashed.
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Jan 9, 2015 15:40
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Just found out my house has QEST pipes after I specifically asked my (highly recommended inspector) to validate that the house did not use it. Do. Never. BBBBUUUUUUUUYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!! So, about $3500 to redo the whole house. Worth it? No leaks yet, house was built in '91.
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Jan 10, 2015 01:24
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Jealous Cow posted:Just found out my house has QEST pipes after I specifically asked my (highly recommended inspector) to validate that the house did not use it. How was that missed? Anyone look under kitchen or bathroom sinks or anywhere in basement? Key spots are going to be visible and readily apparent to a layman vs copper or cpvc.
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Jan 10, 2015 02:21
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Leperflesh posted:My house was built in a working-class city in 1957, and sold for probably like $8,000. The A/C was probably added in the 1970s. These are simple houses, built with inexpensive materials but to a builder's quality that is better than the slapdash stuff developers throw up these days. It has a good foundation and the location (near BART in the SF Bay Area) is the majority of its value. Certainly not Victorian craftsmanship, but good enough as a starter home for me and my wife. Yeah, a lot of houses I looked at still had knob and tube.
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Jan 10, 2015 02:30
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dietcokefiend posted:How was that missed? Anyone look under kitchen or bathroom sinks or anywhere in basement? Key spots are going to be visible and readily apparent to a layman vs copper or cpvc. Copper stubouts can hide that easily enough.
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Jan 10, 2015 05:01
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Jealous Cow posted:Just found out my house has QEST pipes after I specifically asked my (highly recommended inspector) to validate that the house did not use it. Quick googling suggests that it depends on the environment the pipe is in and the water in your area. Things suggest that chloride ions lead to embrittlement and cracking. So if your house has favorable conditions, then you're probably safe. You could inspect it and look for cracks (think microscopic). Piping will usually get small cracks before they actually leak. That's assuming it's the pipe that fails. The fittings, elbows, and joints could be the parts that fail as well. If you can reduce the number of fittings in your walls, you are less likely to leak. And that's another reason why copper is so good, because it's mostly soldered. This is coming from a chemical engineer who usually deals with industrial process piping applications and has never actually worked-on/spec'ed out home piping system, so make of that what you will. If figuring out that kind of stuff is not up your alley, and it bothers you, then it might be smart to just go ahead and replace it. It has been almost 25 years. The cost would be off-set by one bad leak.
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Jan 10, 2015 05:31
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Friend of mine had that stuff in their house that was built in the 80's. They had a bad leak last year, $6000 to clean up and that's not including replacing plumbing. If that helps any....
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Jan 10, 2015 05:41
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So my wife and I are planning on buying our first house pretty soon, and she's a doctor. She can get a mortgage without putting money down (although there is a slight increase in rate and fees). We have enough money for 20% down for what we want, but some of her student loans are at ~8%, so I'm thinking that we can borrow more, pay off that amount in the student loans at 8%, have new debt at 3.75% (and tax deductible and default-able, unlike the student loans), and pay less per month with basically no downside. My question is: is there a downside for us as home buyers? In particular, we're considering a "pre short sale," whatever the heck that means.
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Jan 11, 2015 07:15
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Bozart posted:So my wife and I are planning on buying our first house pretty soon, and she's a doctor. She can get a mortgage without putting money down (although there is a slight increase in rate and fees). We have enough money for 20% down for what we want, but some of her student loans are at ~8%, so I'm thinking that we can borrow more, pay off that amount in the student loans at 8%, have new debt at 3.75% (and tax deductible and default-able, unlike the student loans), and pay less per month with basically no downside. Are you in the South?
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Jan 11, 2015 07:17
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Citizen Tayne posted:Are you in the South? No, Connecticut.
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Jan 11, 2015 07:22
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I always thought that zero down poo poo was exclusive to the South. Carry on.
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Jan 11, 2015 08:41
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Yeah, they figure doctors have a steady employment (and often little financial sense) so they can loan them money at a higher rate (and fees) and ask for less than 20% down, so they can go out and buy a house after getting paid jack poo poo during residency. Here is one article about it. I think everything there is basically right about our situation, except that instead of borrowing more to invest we'd be borrowing more to refi loans with far worse terms. I mean, I'll be a signer on the new loan while I wasn't one to her student loans, but saving 500 bucks a month seems like a no brainer. The thing I'm worried about is if the decreased downpayment would matter at all to the lien holders of the short sale. It shouldn't; they are not getting the downpayment at all, but I don't want to assume.
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Jan 11, 2015 17:01
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Bozart posted:So my wife and I are planning on buying our first house pretty soon, and she's a doctor. She can get a mortgage without putting money down (although there is a slight increase in rate and fees). We have enough money for 20% down for what we want, but some of her student loans are at ~8%, so I'm thinking that we can borrow more, pay off that amount in the student loans at 8%, have new debt at 3.75% (and tax deductible and default-able, unlike the student loans), and pay less per month with basically no downside.
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Jan 11, 2015 22:07
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Dik Hz posted:When you say rate and fees, are you sure you're including PMI? That might shift the numbers around a little bit if you haven't included it. Those doctors loans usually bundle PMI into the interest rate for about .375%
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Jan 11, 2015 22:36
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Pryor on Fire posted:The fed has indicated rates are on their way back up sometime in the middle of 2015, it's not a 100% sure thing but pretty drat predictable right now. There's an argument to be made for lower income people who are more sensitive to rate changes (higher income people don't care as much and get more benefit from the tax deduction) to be looking to close a deal soonish. I really don't know how to feel about the whole interest rate thing. On one hand, a low rate is a really great thing since it minimizes your monthly payment. So you'd think that you'd want to get locked in at a low rate On the other hand, if interest rates rise then real estate prices are going to fall. By how much? Well, people are only going to pay what they can afford, so it's going to depend on the amount by which interest rates rise. If prices fall enough, suddenly all of those people are underwater. As a prospective home buyer, I'd rather have the high interest low principle loan. Interest is deductible, and if rates ever fall again then you can refinance. If your home value plummets, however, then you're pretty much trapped there with a huge mortgage. File bankruptcy, I guess. So it feels like real estate is a really poor investment, if you're just looking for an investment. QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 08:26 on Jan 12, 2015 |
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Jan 12, 2015 06:14
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Or do what I did. Low rate, low principal. We bought cheap when rates were low, so even if rates jump and our value goes down, I doubt it'll go to less than we paid (last several comp sales have been ~$140k, and we bought at $100k). Even if we ended up "underwater", our payment is very comfortable and we're planning to stay in the area for a long time.
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Jan 12, 2015 21:55
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Someone a few pages back asked about buying and selling at the same time. We did that last year, and without a contingency to sell our current home because we knew that the seller might balk at this. But we could also afford to pay both mortgages indefinitely if necessary. And it's a good thing too, because neither transaction went smoothly. One of our requirements was that the sellers had to have the home professionally cleaned before we took possession. We showed up for the final walkthrough (scheduled the day before closing) to find the seller cramming his car full of junk and asking us to wait another hour before we went through the house. After getting a cup of coffee, we came back and saw him tossing even more stuff over the fence into the neighbor's yard. During our walkthrough the house was filthy, but they insisted that they had the place cleaned and there was "just a little dirt" from moving boxes/furniture. We asked for a receipt from the cleaning and they couldn't produce one because supposedly it was a cash transaction and the receipt had been lost. At that point we were ready to walk away, but our agent finagled some kind of deal where we would sign papers at closing, but the loan wouldn't be funded until the sellers had produced a receipt from a professional cleaner and we had one more walkthrough. Oh, and well after closing the sellers had mail delivered to our house. Not just letters or bills, but furniture in huge boxes. Then they would call our agent to schedule pick up times and be angry that we didn't bring their shipments inside our home. Finally we had enough and started returning their packages to UPS (luckily we had a store less than a block away) and after two instances of that, they stopped. Selling our old home was even worse. We lived there for years without any problems, and as soon as we put it on the market, there was an awful hail storm that totaled our roof. A realtor was showing our house and somehow cracked the toilet tank. We were 45 minutes away when he called us, and we arrived to find nobody at the house and he hadn't even shut off the water so half the carpet in the house was soaked. Cue shop vac, floor fans, and a dehumidifer. Later we foolishly tried to DIY a toilet install and broke something underneath the tile, so a plumber had to come out and jackhammer the floor to replace it. Then there was a wind storm that blew down half the fence. With all this going on, the house wasn't move in ready for about 6 weeks. It took a few months to have an offer accepted (lots of competition from new construction). We went under contract in the beginning of October and closed in the first week of December. The buyer had some sort of city grant to help her afford housing, and then there were student loan issues and gift funds issues and the lender kept setting closing dates and asking for extensions because their underwriters were over-worked. In the end we had six months with two house payments. So ... do never buy, do never sell? On the bright side it feels incredibly luxurious to only have one house payment now! And there haven't been any expensive surprises in the new home (only major thing was $500 or so to repair a sticky garage door).
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Jan 13, 2015 00:18
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QuarkJets posted:As a prospective home buyer, I'd rather have the high interest low principle loan. Interest is deductible, and if rates ever fall again then you can refinance. If your home value plummets, however, then you're pretty much trapped there with a huge mortgage. File bankruptcy, I guess. It's always worth mentioning that global (national) trends don't always make or break an investment. When you buy a single house, on a single street, in a single school district, in a single town, etc., at a specific price. Interest rates and bulk pricing trends are only a portion of the overall equation. Buying a house also occurs on a human scale with a single sample point.
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Jan 13, 2015 00:18
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Tojai posted:One of our requirements was that the sellers had to have the home professionally cleaned before we took possession. Why would you delegate this to the seller, instead of doing it yourselves?
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Jan 13, 2015 00:33
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bartkusa posted:Why would you delegate this to the seller, instead of doing it yourselves? That was the advice of our agent. It may be a regional thing here; when we bought our other house we were advised to request a professional cleaning, and the buyer for the house we sold asked the same thing as well. Anyway the house was really dirty, and we wanted it clean when we moved in, and didn't want to have to deal with cleaning up another person's mess. After seeing some of the photos in this thread maybe we were overreacting, but we wanted didn't want to deal with crayon drawings on the walls, caked on food in the microwave and oven, toothpaste and soap smeared all over the bathroom, dustbunnies everywhere, stuff like that.
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Jan 13, 2015 00:42
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Google says you shouldn't make big purchases right before the closing date. From what I understand, that's because you get new debt from it and they check your credit report again on closing day. What if you take the money straight out of your account via a debit card payment or whatever? That wouldn't incur any new debt since you're paying it all upfront. Would doing that cause any problems with the rear end in a top hat mortgage people?
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Jan 13, 2015 00:57
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