Att'n Home owners! Is it worth it?

Guess we were lucky.

 

Good shopping

 

My &$%&# lender won't even allow me to raise my hurricane deductable.

How they are legally able to get away with that, I don't know. I mentioned it as a possible story to my paper's insurance reporter, but she's never written anything on it.

Can a lender make sure I'm covered? Yes.

Tell me how much of a deductable I can take? WTF?

54 months, bloodsuckers. Then it's goodbye forever to debt.

 

10 percent?

You had better put that amount down ... minimum.... to get a loan that is safer than a Great White Shark in a tank with Dubya's "blood-soaked underwear".

I don't believe you can hope for that under any circumstance.

 

It takes 20 percent down just to waive PMI.

I'm not sure 90 percent would guarantee a lender waiving escrow.

 

We have an escrow account, but PMI is the biggest racket because like herpes, you can't get rid of it.

Because we had an FHA loan, we had it on our first house. Ten years in, we owed $110,000 and the SoCal real estate market was going berserk. Homes in our area were selling for $300k plus.

With that, I tried to get rid of it with our lender, which shall remain nameless other than its name begins with the letter C and ends with ountrywide. They send me a letter (I had to request the waiving of PMI in writing) saying that rising property values do not negate the loan-to-value ratio required to waive PMI.

So I waived Countrywide, refinancing within a month of receiving that letter with another lender.

 

Exactly. And Rok, who's to say that when the market does bottom out, Sue would actually be in a position to buy the house? If it's the one, then go for it.

 

Then things have changed since a couple friends of mine bought homes. Their lenders only made them put down 10 percent.

 

You can put zero down with some lenders. But it takes 20 percent (or extremely good credit, a slightly higher interest and a nice lender) to shake PMI.

 

PMI is now deductible.

 

Not quite true... you need to have 20 percent into the value of the home.
If you buy a house at 90k with nothing down, and pay off 10k at the same time the home value rises to 100k, PMI comes off...

 

For PMI you need to have 20% down or have your mortgage balance be 80% of the purchase price for the bank to waive PMI.

Seven years ago when I bought my home I paid 10% down. A few years later when another 10% was paid off through principal payments (I was paying an extra $100-$150 a month toward the principal to get it down quicker) the bank cancelled the PMI and sent me a refund check for the portion of the unused PMI payments.

I don't know what it would take to waive the escrow payments. But I imagine if you told the bank you wanted to pay the taxes on your own they would let you and then threaten to cancel your mortgage if you miss a tax payment. The bank I have my mortgage through threatened to cancel my mortgage a month after I moved in because I didn't pay a sewer bill I didn't know about (never received one from the township and the jerk that I bought the condo from never told me that the payment was due that month).