Industry Insights

Buying a home can be a complex process – especially if it’s your first time. The stockpile of loan paperwork alone can be daunting. It’s safe to say that there’s a lot to keep track of. So staying organized – and vigilant – will not only help de-stress the home buying process, but it can...

When you think of theft, you probably think of someone stealing your wallet, your phone or maybe even your car. The idea of home theft may never have occurred to you – after all, how could anyone walk away with your home in their back pocket? Home theft can happen, though. It happens when a...

What is a cloud on title? Find out what happens to your title when you have one and how to remove it.

You got your finances in order to help you buy your dream home, and you organized a tall stack of paperwork to get a mortgage preapproval. You did everything right. But with home prices on the rise, you might discover that the price tag on your dream home is higher than the amount you’ve been...

Sometimes everything happens at once. Let’s say you’re a passionate entrepreneur with a small business that’s finally ready to scale up with the right financing when you learn that your family is about to grow, and you need a bigger house. Applying for a mortgage and a business loan at the same time is a...

Let’s say you’ve found the perfect fixer-upper, and you think you can turn it around with a few months of work. All you need is money – money to acquire the property, invest in supplies and pay contractors to make the repairs and upgrades you can’t make on your own. While you may have gotten...

You’ve made a lot of progress in the home buying process. You’ve started saving money for a down payment, spent time house hunting and found your dream home. Now you’re ready to move ahead with a mortgage lender. And you’ve come to the point where you need to make the all-important “credit union vs. bank...

In the market for a mortgage? The most common mortgage type and length (aka term) you’ll find as you shop around is the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage.  Even though the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is the most popular loan out there, most homeowners don’t stay in their homes until the mortgage is paid off. When a homeowner...

Property taxes are payments you make to help fund your local, city and state governments so that they can provide you with public services.  And that’s important. Ask yourself where you would be without vital community services like fire, police, schools, sanitation and, of course, local parks and recreation facilities. You may be wondering how...

You’ve persisted through long weeks of negotiations, tons of paperwork and hours of scrolling through home furnishing websites as you mentally decorated your new pad. But dreamtime is over. Now it’s time to collect those keys and rest your weary feet in your new home.  It also happens to be a time for checklists and...

When you’re looking at home mortgages, most lenders will list their 30-year fixed-rate mortgage right at the top.  How popular is it? Well, according to statistical data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), on new residential mortgages between 1998 and 2020, an average of 69.4% of mortgages were 20- and 30-year fixed-rate mortgage loans....

For most home buyers, there’s no buying a house without getting a mortgage – and there’s no getting a mortgage without getting a mortgage lender.  Think of mortgage lenders as the gatekeepers to homeownership.  If you pay with cash, you can skip right past the lender. But if you’re like the rest of us –...

One reason why debt can feel overwhelming is that there seems to be so much of it. Like a crowded closet, we recoil at the chaos and try to pretend that it doesn’t exist.  But debt, like clutter, will catch up with us eventually. To face our debt, we must face our fears, embrace our...