Take a deep breath. The market recovered from terrorist attacks, the falls of Enron, WorldCom and Arthur Andersen, soaring oil prices and one very expensive war. Can this sub-prime crisis really hold the market back? To answer this query, the cause must be examined.
Sub-prime loans are generally offered by lenders to customers with either no credit or a poor credit history. In most cases, these loans include adjustable interest rates. During the initial years of the loan, the interest rate will be low (as compared to fixed rate loans for the same customer) and fixed, effectively lulling the payer into a false sense of security. After this initial period, the rates generally revert to the prime rate plus a specified margin. The prime rate varies directly with the Federal Funds Rate set by the Federal Reserve. For example, for the first two years, the lender may offer the loan for 8.9 percent, and then the rate for the remaining years becomes the prime rate plus 6.5 percent. If the prime rate is 5.5 percent for year three of the loan, the payer is stung with a twelve percent interest rate. Continue reading »
Small business owners generally fall into two categories. There are the business owners that let their accounting tasks, invoicing, and payables pile up on their desk - or even in a shoe box, until they’re forced to face the music. Usually this happens around tax time.
The other sides of the coin are the business owner that are amazingly organized and know where every penny of their money is going. What do these business owners have that the rest of us don’t? More time? A PhD in accounting? Nope, chances are they have a system. To put it more simply, they’re organized. If you’re in the crowd of business owners that let it all pile up, there are a few things we can learn from the more organized folks. If we take just a few of the steps organized business owners take, not only will we save several days of excruciating paperwork, we will have a firmer grasp on our money.
Here are some recommendations for good bookkeeping practices:
#1: Record income and expenses on a regular basis. If you have a budget, recording this information is as easy as taking a few minutes each week or about an hour a month and recording your income and expenses on your budget. Your budget will have expense categories that reflect your business and which are broken into subcategories that make it easy for you to record. For the less organized, a simple system is to keep a file for your week’s receipts and payments. Using this method all you have to do is pull out your paperwork at the end of the week, add it up, record it, and you’re good to go. Literally 10-15 minutes of your time.
Today’s economy is very dependent upon mortgage interest rates. Right now the interest rates are very low. This, of course, is good. Today, a 30-year mortgage can be obtained for about 6%, maybe less. At 6%, a $200,000 mortgage for 30 years would result in a monthly payment of $1,199.10.
What would happen if mortgage rates suddenly went up to 10%? Well, this same mortgage would require a monthly payment of $1,755.14. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that this would have a negative effect on the overall economy. Someone requiring a $200,000 mortgage to buy a home, would need to be able pay $550 more per month to qualify for the same loan.
To the economy, this is wasted money. If a person was required to come up with $550 more per month to buy the house because the price was that much higher, it would be negated by the fact the seller would have made more money by selling the house.
When you have bad credit you may think that home ownership is off limits to you, but this is not necessarily the case. Even if you don’t have perfect standing it may still be possible for you to get the home loan that you need to make home ownership a reality for you. You may need to go about it all differently, but home ownership isn’t out of the realm of possibilities.
Lending Help When You Have Bad Credit
You may be been told in the past that when you need home financing that you have to have good to excellent credit, but this may not be accurate. There are many people out there who own homes that have terrible creditworth or even a nonexistent FICO scores and they were still able to buy a home.
You just need to know how to go about it or work with a broker that knows the ins and outs of getting financing even when you have less than perfect borrowing history. The first thing you may want to look into when trying to get into a new home is making a down payment on it.
Self-certification mortgages have not enjoyed a good reputation in the property market in recent years. Several years ago evidence emerged that some applicants were exaggerating their incomes in order to achieve bigger loans. It was alleged that a minority of applicants may have also been lying about their incomes altogether and may have actually been unemployed.
Since then the Financial Services Authority, and several media companies, have conducted research into the self-cert market. While the FSA has given the market the green light on several occasions others have not. Self-certification mortgages have been labeled “liar loans” in the United States and while they haven’t adopted the same nickname in the UK their reputation is similar.
Equity has long been the golden egg of the property investing world. Build up enough equity in your property portfolio and you will never need to work again. Countless celebrity investors and seminar givers have championed the call for us all to buy property and build up equity so we can live the dream of telling our boss where to go and quitting our jobs once and for all.
So how does it work? How does equity help us to achieve our dreams and regain our freedom? After all, equity is not cash and we pay for things with cash. Equity is a paper profit or wealth that exists only on paper. In order to cash in our paper wealth do we not need to sell our buy-to-let properties? This is the question amateur investors and complete novices are most likely to ask.
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