Loft Bauhaus by Ana Paula Barros

Loft Bauhaus by Ana Paula Barros Brasilia

Architects: Ana Paula Barros Location: Brasília, DF, Brasil Design Team: Rafael Papi, Beatriz San Salvador Project Area: 160 sqm Project Year: 2011 Photographs: Edgard Cézar



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Report: Tax Sales Fueling Second Foreclosure Crisis

The Boston-based National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) says outdated state laws that permit local governments to sell property through tax lien foreclosures are fueling a second nationwide foreclosure crisis.
"Homeowners throughout the nation, particularly (the) elderly and people with cognitive challenges, have lost or stand to lose family homes along with long-term equity which may represent their sole savings and security for retirement," said NCLC attorney John Rao, author of "The Other Foreclosure Crisis: Property Tax Lien Sales." A tax lien sale may be started over nonpayment of a small delinquent tax bill for a few hundred dollars, and then sold at a tax lien sale for simply the back taxes owed on the property. If the homeowner fails to buy back the property, the purchaser acquires the home for very little. Thus a $200,000 home might be sold for as little as $1,200, and then resold for a huge profit. Currently, annual tax lien sales total approximately $15 billion nationwide and are on the rise due to the weak job market, depressed home values, and an increase in mortgage foreclosures, the NCLC said.
Homeowners most vulnerable are those who have fallen into default because they are incapable of managing their financial affairs, such as individuals suffering from Alzheimer's, dementia, or other cognitive disorders. And one government study found that last year property tax foreclosures in New York City were highly concentrated among low-income communities with large African American and Latino populations, groups also targeted by subprime mortgage lenders.
"Our report is a wake-up call for states to reform tax sale laws to keep speculators from reaping huge windfalls at the expense of fragile citizens while still ensuring local governments receive much needed tax revenue," Rao said.

FHA new rule on "Collections Accounts" will affect new homeowners.....

A little-noticed mortgage rule change that took effect April 1 could create hassles for significant numbers of homebuyers who plan to use low down-payment FHA financing this spring.
The change affects anyone with one or more “collection” accounts buried away in national credit bureau files. These include medical, student loan, retail and other debts reported as unpaid – correctly or incorrectly – by creditors and subsequently sent to collection agencies.
In a reversal of its previous policy, the Federal Housing Administration says it will no longer approve applications where the borrowers have outstanding collections or disputed accounts with an aggregate of $1,000 or more in unpaid bills. Previously, the agency took a more lenient approach, allowing lenders to review borrowers’ overall credit situation and approve applications despite the presence of such accounts.

Mission Statement

Under its new rule, when collection items total $1,000 or more, the accounts will need to be paid off over a period of several months or be paid in full at or before the closing. In cases where the collections or disputed debts are attributable to identity theft, credit-card theft or unauthorized use of the applicant’s credit – or when collection accounts total less than $1,000 and are at least two years old – the new rule may be waived.
The policy shift, which the agency says is part of its ongoing efforts to reduce loan defaults and insurance claims, has upset some mortgage lenders specializing in FHA business. Clem Ziroli Jr., president of First Mortgage Corp. in Covina, Calif., estimates that under the new standard, “35 percent of borrowers who’ve obtained FHA financing historically (would be) ineligible.” He complained in an email that “FHA’s mission has always been to serve low- to moderate-income borrowers” – a population segment where the presence of one or more collections on a credit report is not unusual.
Jeremy House, a loan officer with national mortgage firm Prime Lending in Tempe, Ariz., noted that there are vast numbers of consumers with medical collection accounts outstanding in their credit files, sometimes long forgotten or dating back years, who will be hit hard by the policy change.
“I’m talking about people with solid incomes and high (credit) scores,” he said in an interview. He cited the example of an applicant with a FICO score of 770 who recently discovered that two new medical collections had popped up on his credit reports. The applicant said he had no knowledge of the unpaid bills or the doctor, and believes them to be in error. But the sudden appearance of the collection items knocked his FICO score down to 655. Under the new FHA policy, it could take months – at best – to dispute and resolve the issue.

Underwriting Minefield

Brad Yzermans, a loan officer with First Priority Financial Inc. in Temecula, Calif., says the heaviest impacts of the rule change will be in areas that have experienced high unemployment, negative equity and foreclosure problems over the past several years.
“I think this is a big deal,” he said in an interview. Large percentages of potential home purchasers – many of them minorities – inevitably have accumulated collection accounts as direct effects of local economic struggles. Yzermans said he’s already had to short-circuit the applications of three buyers who have open collections in their files but previously would have breezed through underwriting for an FHA loan.
Worse, he added, there are buyers who are now somewhere in the pre-closing pipeline whose case files won’t be assigned numbers at FHA by the April 1 deadline. Those people may now be forced to postpone their plans – or even lose the house they wanted to purchase.
Yzermans said that as a result of steadily rising insurance premiums and tightening of underwriting rules at FHA, “I’m starting to move my business more in the direction of conventional loans” – those eligible for purchase by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac – where borrowers can obtain low down-payment financing using private mortgage insurance.
Bottom line: If you are considering applying for an FHA-insured mortgage to buy a house, be aware of the new policy. Well in advance of any loan application, order your credit reports from all three national bureaus – Equifax, Experian and TransUnion – or get them free at the bureaus’ jointly run online site, www.annualcreditreport.com. If you find outstanding collections that exceed $1,000, dispute them, negotiate them down, pay them off or otherwise make them disappear if you want to zip through the FHA underwriting minefield.
Ken Harney’s email address is kenharney@earthlink.net.

Cambios para la Refinanciación de Casas que valen menos que el Valor de Mercado

Los Cambios en el Plan Harp 2 incluye

No Limite en el Valor de la Casa: quiere decir que no importa que bajo sea el valor actual de su casa comparado al valor de la deuda actual.

Tasaciones: serian eliminadas para disminuir los gastos de cierre y evitar la ansiedad que produce durante la refinanciación.

Fecha de cierre de este programa: fue extendido hasta el 31 de Diciembre de 2013.

Muy importante que este programa funciona con casas que pertenecen a Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac y que fueron compradas antes del primero de Junio de 2009.

Por favor chequee estos dos website para saber si su casa pertenece a estas dos entidades del Gobierno.
http://www.freddiemac.com/mymortgage
http://www.fanniemae.com/loanlookup/

Si tiene alguna pregunta por favor llameme al 617-231-0002
Alejandra Creatini

Some homeowners will receive $2000 checks settlement over foreclosure abuses....

More than 40 states have agreed to a nationwide settlement over foreclosure abuses.

The deal would force the five largest mortgage lenders to reduce loans for about 1 million households. And the remaining holdouts could sign onto a deal in the coming days.

Officials say that negotiators worked well into Monday night to persuade more states to join the settlement. There is growing optimism that California, Delaware, Nevada, New York and others will eventually sign on. It is unlikely Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley will agree to sign the deal.

The reduced loans would benefit homeowners who are behind on their payments and owe more than their homes are worth. The lenders - Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial - would also send checks for about $2,000 to hundreds of thousands of people who lost homes to foreclosure. (AP)

Lesson #1 and #2

Lesson #1 - Why the U.S. was downgraded:


• U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000

• Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000

• New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000

• National debt: $14,271,000,000,000

• Recent budget cuts: $ 38,500,000,000



Let's now remove 8 zeros and pretend it's a household budget:

• Annual family income: $21,700

• Money the family spent: $38,200

• New debt on the credit card: $16,500

• Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710

• Total budget cuts: $385

Got it?



Lesson #2 - Here's another way to look at the Debt Ceiling:



Let's say, You come home from work and find there has been a

sewer backup in your neighborhood....and your home has

sewage all the way up to your ceilings.


What do you think you should do?

1. Raise the Ceilings, or

2. Pump out the sewage

Think about it....

Library of Congress to receive entire Twitter archive

Wednesday - 12/7/2011, 12:34am ET

Bill Lefurgy, digital initiatives program manager, Library of Congress

The Library of Congress and Twitter have signed an agreement that will see an archive of every public Tweet ever sent handed over to the library's repository of historical documents.

"We have an agreement with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be public," said Bill Lefurgy, the digital initiatives program manager at the library's national digital information infrastructure and preservation program. The archives don't contain tweets that users have protected, but everything else — billions and billions of tweets — are there.

Lefurgy joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin and Amy Morris Tuesday morning to talk about the library's digital mission.

Using new technical processes it has developed, Twitter is moving a large quantity of electronic data from one electronic source to another. "They've had to do some pretty nifty experimentation and invention to develop the tools and a process to be able to move all of that data over to us," Lefurgy said.

The Library of Congress has long been the repository of important, historical documents and the Twitter library, as a whole, is something historic in itself.

"We were excited to be involved with acquiring the Twitter archives because it's a unique record of our time," Lefurgy said. "It's also a unique way of communication. It's not so much that people are going to be interested in what you or I had for lunch, which some people like to say on Twitter."

Researchers will be able to look at the Twitter archive as a complete set of data, which they could then data-mine for interesting information.

"There have been studies involved with what are the moods of the public at various times of the day in reaction to certain kinds of news events," Lefurgy said. "There's all these interesting kinds of mixing and matching that can be done using the tweets as a big set of data."

One benefit for the Library of Congress in receiving this large data set is that it's been forced to stretch itself technologically.

"It's been difficult at times," Lefurgy said. "But we firmly believe that we have to do this kind of thing because we anticipate that we'll be bringing in large data sets again into the future. We don't know specifically what, but certainly there's no sign of data getting smaller or less complicated or less interesting."

The library's Twitter partnership comes amid a renewed push by the administration and the National Archives and Records Administration for federal agencies to better archive their own social media postings and emails as potential government records.

"We're basically in the same situation as the National Archives, only on a much larger scale," Lefurgy said. "We tend to have a much larger perspective in terms of what we collect."

Federal Radio