The Federal Reserve meets next week for a policy-setting meeting. It’s one of 8 scheduled Fed meetings this year in which the Federal Open Market Committee votes on whether to raise, lower, or leave unchanged the Fed Funds Rate. Based on data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Wall Street’s expectations of the [...]

For the third week in a row, mortgage markets improved early in the week, only to give back the gains before Friday’s close. Mortgage rates ended last week exactly where they started. However, if you locked your mortgage rate Tuesday, you got a rate decidedly lower than someone who waited until Friday. Last week, one [...]

With respect to housing data, news is rarely positive or negative on a universal level. There’s always two perspectives to consider, after all. The home buyer’s perspective The home seller’s perspective Usually, when data is beneficial to one group, it’s less beneficial to the other. This is true for rising home prices, average days on [...]

Since 2007, foreclosures have dominated real estate news. You can’t turn on the news or open a paper without some foreclosure-related story. But for all of the discussion, foreclosures continue to be geographically concentrated. Adding up the latest stats from RealtyTrac.com, more than half of the country’s foreclosure actions from March occurred in just 3 [...]

Have you ever wondered what one trillion dollars looks like? With all the talk about bailouts and stimulus packages – a million here, a billion there – it's pretty easy to lose track of exactly how MUCH money they're talking about. $100 Let's start with a simple $100 bill – nearly everyone has seen one, [...]

Have you ever wondered what one trillion dollars looks like? With all the talk about bailouts and stimulus packages – a million here, a billion there – it's pretty easy to lose track of exactly how MUCH money they're talking about. $100 Let's start with a simple $100 bill – nearly everyone has seen one, [...]

It’s Tax Day today and who among us doesn’t love a legitimate tax deduction? The IRS expects to process 138 million tax returns this year and accompanying those returns will be a melange of tax deduction requests. Most will be run-of-the-mill including such staples as mortgage interest, vehicle mileage, and child care deductions. Others, however, [...]

Shopping for low mortgage rates is a game of luck. Some days, mortgage rates are favorable. Other days, they’re not. And while you can sometimes make an educated guess about where rates might be headed, you’re not always going to guess right. Even the experts get it wrong more often than they’d like. But some [...]

For the second week in a row, mortgage markets started the week strong and then ended with a fizzle. In the holiday-shortened week, rates were exactly flat overall. There wasn’t much economic data to move rates last week, incidentally. The market’s up-and-down action was largely based on two events: A reputable analyst said banking-sector optimism [...]

When conforming mortgages adjust, they’re often tied to an interest rate index called LIBOR. LIBOR is an acronym for London Interbank Offered Rate. But what LIBOR stands for isn’t as important as the role it plays. LIBOR is an interest rate at which banks borrow money from each other. Therefore, when banks feel the banking [...]