71–80 of 132 posts
> Estimated monthly payment based on purchasing $400,000 home with 20% down, $567/mo taxes and insurance, and 1.65% closing costs. Does anyone know the source of these numbers? Example: The are national median values. Except maybe Texas, where else can you buy a house/apt in the US near a major job center for only 400k?
Are you in CA, NY, or MA? I wonder if your scale is skewed.
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If you were looking to buy a house right now, you'd be looking at a bunch of options that are worse than what you currently have. You experience this as lock-in but in reality the "problem" is just that you have something significantly better than anything you (or others) can find on the market right now. And of course that's actually a fantastic boon.
But part of that is because people who would otherwise want to sell their house are choosing NOT to, because they don't want to lose their great mortgage. If we didn't have these long, fixed rate, mortgages, there would be a lot more housing liquidity and prices wouldn't be so inflated. Now, there is a cycle of "rates go down, there is a flurry of re-finances and everyone locks in the lower rates and new buyers enter…
I didn't do a CU for my mortgage (mostly because my lender is awesome and I'm happy with our rate), but I did for my recent auto loan and moved my accounts to them. NIGHT AND DAY DIFFERENCE. customer service is fantastic and their online banking app/website is no bullshit. It even supports TOTP 2FA, which I definitely wasn't expecting given that the huge bank I came from didn't for some reason. Can't recommend a cred…
Does anyone else think that the government should do something like this? Either enforce that vendors sends their offers to a central database which is publicly accessible, or at least make it available so the vendors can choose to send data there (maybe enforce it for big vendors, to get it started).
In general I think it makes sense for the government to be responsible for the market place, and the infrastructure around the market. The data should be avaliable publicly through a API so one could build different frontends and analysis services on it.
Example markets are electricity, deposits, mortgages, housing.
Nice Work! I found our credit union posts the mortgage rates clearly on a plain text like page. There's no BS and no games. Whereas with the big banks, you get the games and higher rates .. no matter if they have records of 10 years of your salary deposits. When I tried to suggest credit unions to friends, I got looks. Like, people just assume what everyone else does (get conned by big banks) is good.
I too have noticed an inexplicable apprehension about credit unions, even large ones such as Wings. They are almost uniformly better for individuals than big banks, yet people imagine a scenario where they'll need to withdraw cash in the middle of the Mojave so they need WF. Spoiler: 1) you won't and 2) you still can.
Ideas for monetization: Setup an automatic email alert if prices are changing for a given area and charge 5 USD per year per user.
Also you could extend this project and sell it later to one of the financial mags / publishers / websites.
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There are downsides. I have a really great rate on my mortgage, but our house is super expensive and small for our family… but now we can’t afford to move. If we moved to a new house, we would have to pay off this great mortgage and get a new one, at a much higher interest rate. Even if we found a house that cost the exact same as ours, the monthly payment would be 50% higher, because current interest rates are more…
You used to be able to assume someone's mortgage when you bought their house to keep the good rate going, but that's much less common now
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are downsides. I have a really great rate on my mortgage, but our house is super expensive and small for our family… but now we can’t afford to move. If we moved to a new house, we would have to pay off this great mortgage and get a new one, at a much higher interest rate. Even if we found a house that cost the exact same as ours, the monthly payment would be 50% higher, because current interest rates are more…
What’s the alternative that’s better? Having a 5/1 or 1/1 ARM just means that your current house’s mortgage would also be more expensive because your 3% mortgage would have adjusted upward by now. If you’re willing to have your current mortgage be more expensive to avoid the “downside of being locked into a low payment, you could just pretend your mortgage had adjusted and go buy a house that suits your needs better.
good one, mission accomplished! ++1 Ideas for monetization: Setup an automatic email alert if prices are changing for a given area and charge 5 USD per year per user. Also you could extend this project and sell it later to one of the financial mags / publishers / websites.