Insurance and Credit

Now that the ink has dried on the Obama Housing Stability Plan, people want to know what’s in it for them. In other words, people want to know will this bill help make my house payments any lower? So here goes: basically the Treasury Department will offer inducements and put pressure on lenders to reduce monthly payments for borrowers at risk of losing their houses which should result in five benefits for homeowners. They include:

1. It Helps Hard-Pressed Homeowners Stay in their Homes: This initiative will reach millions of responsible yet struggling homeowners who can no longer afford their mortgage payments because of the current recession, yet cannot sell their homes because prices have fallen so significantly. Millions of hard-working families have seen their mortgage payments rise to 40 or even 50 percent of their monthly income “. The Homeowner Stability Initiative helps those who commit to make reasonable monthly mortgage payments to stay in their homes ” providing families with security and neighborhoods with stability.

2. No help for flippers. Remember those TV shows where investors boasted of making massive profits by fixing up houses and then reselling them? Those days are mostly gone and in addition, the Obama plan provides no assistance for real estate speculators with homeowners receiving all the funds.

3. The Plan Helps Stabilize Neighborhoods. A foreclosure often brings an unwelcome element into a neighborhood. Most vacant homes attract vandals and vagrants as well as piles of yellowed newspapers on the stoop. Keeping a property from becoming a foreclosure in the first place, the plan helps to stabilize a neighborhood.

4. The Plan Proactively Assists Homeowners Not Yet Late on Payments. Oftentimes responsible homeowners who know that their jobs are in jeopardy due to the recession will call their mortgage lender(s) hoping to make some kind of arrangement, only to be told that there is nothing that can be done. Unless a homeowner is in arrears, banks will not listen to their plea for help. This plan offers assistance to homeowners at risk of default despite being current on their mortgage payments.

5. The Obama Housing Fix-it Plan hopes to make total monthly payments affordable. The approach is to attack the homeowners total debt, and create a payment plan that the homeowner can keep. Using the power of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in conjunction with the Treasury Department, the plan offers to make a homeowner’s debt more sustainable.

The Financial Stability Plan’s goal is to bring back a sense of security to the struggling real estate market. The plan has been designed to discourage lenders from opting to foreclose on mortgages that could be viable now out of fear that home prices will fall even further later on. Plunging house prices, for example, make it harder for purchasers to obtain new loans ” even with good credit, because lenders concerned about the true value of homes, simply refuse to extend credit for fear that they may be in the same situation five years down the road.

The Obama Housing Fix-it Plan has much more to it. Parts of it involve granting incentives to lenders who postpone foreclosures, paying down principal for owners who stay in their property for five years, and even giving incentives to people who successfully modify loans.

The Treasury Department will be using the full power of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to standardize guidelines for loan modifications. And the benefit not talked about to consider is this one: by pumping 75 billion into the economy, the administration is giving the economy a sudden jolt that might be felt as quickly as June. The word on the street is that purchasing a home now and renting it out may prove to be a much safer bet than keeping the money in the bank!

Tags: attorney, business, entertainment, Finance, foreclosures, homes, Investing, money, mortgages, real estate

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 7:02 am and is filed under Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.