Let’s start off the new year with a money saving tip, especially for low-down payment, first-time owners who bought a home more than two years ago. If you bought your home using conventional financing, putting less than 20% down, you undoubtedly had to buy private mortgage insurance or PMI. PMI insures your lender for a … Read more
Despite all the mortgage drama from Federal Reserve policy to debates over what inflation benchmark is best, home loan pricing was actually fairly normal in 2024. To successfully see what’s next for mortgages, please try to ignore the often breathless coverage of the weekly reports – and, more recently, daily updates – tracking the ups … Read more
Home shoppers hoping for more attractive mortgage rates next year may be disappointed. That’s the takeaway from several economists’ 2025 housing forecasts, most released over the past couple of weeks. Most of the eight forecasts call for the average rate on a 30-year mortgage to remain above 6% next year, with some including an upper … Read more
Dramatic change would be required to fix California’s homebuying affordability mess. My trusty spreadsheet compared home-price increases with income growth for 10 large California metropolitan areas using housing indexes by ICE, a mortgage-tech firm, and pay stats from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. First, consider the estimated median house payment for these California metros. … Read more
By Jarrell Dillard, Prashant Gopal and Maria Clara Cobo | Bloomberg Before Donald Trump’s election, Redfin Corp. projected mortgage rates would average 6.1% next year. But three days after the election, they revised their estimate upward to 6.8% – basically unchanged from today’s high levels. “The difference is Trump,” said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at … Read more
By ALEX VEIGA The average rate on a 30-year mortgage in the U.S. edged lower this week, ending a six-week climb. The rate slipped to 6.78% from 6.79% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. That’s still down from a year ago, when the rate averaged 7.4%. Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular … Read more
By Prashant Gopal | Bloomberg For a brief moment, it looked like US homebuyers would finally catch a break. The housing market was beginning to thaw as mortgage rates fell in September to a two-year low. But in the past few weeks, borrowing costs have emerged, by one measure even crossing 7% and raising questions … Read more
Homeowners who purchased in the last year or so could drive themselves nuts trying to find the perfect time to refinance. After all, it hurt bad enough to miss out on those once-in-a-lifetime low rates of 2020 and 2021, and it’s hard to pull the trigger when refinancing today could potentially mean missing out on … Read more
A down-payment program is offering a whopper of an opportunity for first-time homebuyers in California. My Home Down Payment Assistance from the California Housing Finance Agency features a “deferred-payment” loan for down payment and closing costs, covering much of a buyer’s out-of-pocket funds. The down payment assistance or DPA can be as much as 3.5% … Read more
By Kate Wood | NerdWallet Mortgage interest rates are in a pretty good place this week, rising so minimally that the incline could be easily mistaken for a flat surface. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rate rose three basis points, averaging 6.19%. A basis point is one one-hundredth of a percentage point. Mortgage rates are one … Read more
