Mortgage insurance allows Sonoma County home buyers to purchase property with less than 20% down payment.  Banks only want to lend you money if you have the required down but if you pay for insurnace to cover the differnce, you can put less down. 

 If you are currently looking for a Sonoma County home and not planning on putting down 20% then not only are you looking for the best service (that would be me) and rates and fees (also me) ,  you are also looking for which lender is going to offer you the best pricing in mortage insurance (obviuolsy ME). 2-3 years ago when California Real Estate was in a real tail spin, most Private Mortgage Insurance companies all but left the state.   Getting insurnace on a 5% down loan was all but impossible.   At the very least it was very expensive.   The only option was the FHA, which is still agreat option for borrowers with less than 5% down. Now as Sonoma County Real Estate values are moving upward Insurnace companies are coming back to the market.  If you can get to  5% down,which can include gift funds, Private Mortgage Insurance is a much better option than going FHA and the 3.5% down.  There are many options,  when considering PMI and I would be happy to sit down and talk with you about all of them.  You have options.  Is your current lender giving them all to you?

“Hunt For Your Loan”

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If you are thinking about buying a property in Sonoma County, don’t you think it would be a good idea to find out what it will cost you. I can give you access to my mortgage calculator that has todays rates already imbedded in the program so that all you really need to do is plug in a purchase price and down payment and you can find out what your payments are going to be along with you cash to close including closing costs and Pre-paid items. What is nice about the program is that you can be looking at a home in Healdsburg offered for sale at 450,000$ and plug in the numbers. Maybe it is more expensive than that what you are Pre-approved for (becasue you have already been to my website and been pre-approved for a mortgage) so you drop the sale price to 400,000$ and see if you can afford that price. While the payments are important, often the “cash to close” is often a bigger stumbling block. Knowing exactly what dollar amount it is going to take to close your Mortgage loan is critical to your Sonoma county home buying success.

Visit the Real Estate Mortgage Calcualtor just clink on this link…

You can also save it as an app on your phone and take it with you while you look for a Home. Good Luck House hunting. “Hunt for your Loan”. If you have any questions please call or email me.

If you are planning to buy Sonoma County real estate in the next year the first thing you need to do is you have to get pre-approved for a Real Estate Mortgage. It really does you no good to wander the internet or check out open houses with out the knowledge and advantages that being pre-approved for home loan can provide you. Many Sonoma County Realtors won’t even talk with you until you have filled out an applicaton and rightly so. they don’t want you wasting there time. Your appetite could be for a 300,000$ house and your finacnial reality is that you can only afford a 250,000$. The opposite is true as well. You could be looking at 250,000$ houses and really be able to buy something more expensive. There are so many prgrams out there that I can tailor your loan to, you just will never know until you get pre-approved for the mortgage. Filling out a Real Estate mortgage aplication is so easy. It will take you all of about 10 minutes. Just go to my website and Get Pre-Qualified. Call or email me with questions…”Hunt for your Loan”! I am here to make your home buying easy and fun!

The Rating agency that dropped the credit rating from AAA to AA+ is Standard and Poor’s and is only one of three of the rating agencies. It takes two out of the three to actually effect the credit rating of the country’s debt. In addition my opinion of these agencies is not really very high because they are the same ones that rated AAA the tranches that were at the bottom of all the trouble we now face. In additon many believe that the rating drop was done to send a political message to the politicians
That said, we have all expected Sonoma County Real estate mortgage rates to rise by now. We fully expected that we would be experiencing a certain amount of inflation putting pressure on rates but that has just not been the case. In fact what has happened is that we are seeing a flight to safety to the US bond market pushing the yields down to their third lowest level ever. Obviously, every investor out there believes that the likely hood of America defaulting on their debt is lower than any other available option out there.

So today, the effect of the drop by S&P’s mortgage rating I think has little to do with the mortgage rates but the global economic worries are causing rates to drop because of the dramatic interest in the US bond market. Right now we are in a very low real estate mortgage rate cycle that most likely won’t last very long. I would expect rates to rise very moderately over the next couple of weeks but overall stay low through the end of the next quarter. For whatever that is worth.

I still think that Sonoma County Real Estate is the best long term protection against inflation.

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The First Two parts of applying for a Home loan in Sonoma County revolved around the concepts of Credit History and the abiltity to repay the loan using your documented income. Part #3 known as your equity position or down payment deals with “skin in the game” as some would like to refer to it.

The Lowest down payment currently availble would be Zero, nada, nothing for a VA loan. If you are veteran with an honarable discharge, a VA loan with no down payment is certainly a great financing option. You will still have closing costs and the Sonoma County property needs to be in good condition. No fixers here.

The next lowest down payment option is the FHA loan. This has become the most popular choice of Sonoma County Mortgage finance in the last two years becasue it is a Gov’t subsidized program that allows for only a 3.5% down payment. 30 year fixed rates are very competative. The Sonoma County property needs to be in good shape here as well. There can be no deffered maintenece. If there is, we can do an FHA 203 K rehabilitation loan but that is a topic for another day. The majority of the Mortgage insurance is financed into the FHA loan balance itself and makes for a great way to get into the Sonoma County Housing market, especially for first time home buyers.

5% downpayment options are not currently availble for Sonoma County properties because the Mortgage insurance companies still maintain that we are a declining market. I completely disagree as I am seeing many properties in Healdsburg, Windsor and Santa Rosa selling for asking prices or even slightly above. This could change any day now so make sure you give me a call to find out the latest. 10% down payments are availble for owner occupied Sonoma County buyers using a National Mortgage Insurance Company but generally speaking it is easier and less expensive to get a FHA loan at the reduced Mortage Insurance rate.

20% Down payments are truly the best option if you can afford it for an Owner Occupied home loan in Sonoma County. This will afford you the best in Rates and Terms.

Please Contact Hunt Conrad, 328-1233, for the best rates and service for a Sonoma County Home Loan

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Part II of our series on the elements needed to qualify for a home loan revolves around the notion that you need to be able to prove that you can repay the debt or make the house payments you are about to incur. We no longer have the Stated(wink wink) income loan. Income documentation has become one of the biggest stumbling blocks for people getting approved for mortgages.

If you are W-2 employed for at least two years in the same line of work or profession then you have nothing to fear. Your paystubs coupled with your w-2′s for the last two years will be all the proof you need. However if you have changed jobs recently or have breaks in your employment history then things will be appreciably harder for you.

If you are Retired, then proving all of your income sources will be more difficult because you are probaly receiving money form a variety of sources including Social Security, Pension, annuities and the like that aren’t necessarily showing up on your tax retuns. If you are drawing on an existing retirement plan for example, you will need to document the consitent withdrawls from the account and show the deposits going into your checking account. A lot of retirees also do a little work on the side. But unless you pay taxes and can prove it with tax retunrns then that income will not be used for qualigying purposes.

Self Employed borrowers have the hardest time qualifying for loans becuase often the income that they make is not necarrily reflected in their tax returns. Often a Self employed borrower will write off a lot of expeneses needed to make the money but that adjusted income is now what is used to qualify and is quite a bit lower. Often the most affluent of our society is self employed, has a great credit credit history and money in the bank, but becasue of the way our tax system works, they can’t qulaify for a home loan.

I have helped all sorts of borrowers figure out ways to qualify for mortgages. Call or email me today and let me answer all your mortgage questions. Dealing with a seasoned professional will often save you a lot of headaches in the long run. 707-328-1233. Hunt For Your Loan

The first element looked at in any loan application for a home loan in Sonoma County is going to be your credit history. How have you paid your bills? Do you pay them faithfully on time? Or do you tend to drag them out and juggle payments with the occasioanl slip up every once in a while? Or have you had a major life changing event occur in your life recently that has forced you to miss payments alltogether.

At the beginning of every loan application, we “pull” your credit report. We use three different companies called repositories that report your credit and assign you a FICO score. These scores can differ by as much
as 100 points. They digest the information they have been given by the creditors and assign a credit risk score to the borrower. If one company has more missed payements or derogatory entries for what ever reason then the score will be lower than the other company. That is why we use three different scores and only use the middle one, tossing out the high and the low. If you are married or a partner in transaction we will use the lower of the two middle scores as the primary credit score.

There is a lot that goes into why credit scores go up and down and it used to be a big secret but every credit report now provides the consumer with the reasoning behind the score as well as provides the creditors contact information. A couple of the more common reasons behind credit scores being effected aside fom the obvious missing of payments are as follows.
Too many inquiries; This is probably the biggest reason borrowers scores come down. They are shopping around for the best rates (and I have already told you you no one gets the best mortgage rate) and along the way their credit is pulled time and again and each inquiry can result in a 5 point drop or more in score. This is sometimes easily explained but can drop you in to an area that will put your mortgage application at risk.
Credit Balances too high: If you have credit cards and you carry a balance that is higher than 50% of the total available credit then your score will be dinged. Balances that are close to 100% max will be severely hit.
Too many open accounts: Pretty obvious…
Lenght of time accounts have been established: again pretty obvious.
There are many more and certainly knowing your credit score is just the beginning of understanding this key component to obtaining a home mortgage. Give me a call or email me and I can help you get a handle on your credit. 707-431-9715…hunt@prospectmtg.com

Market Update
Treasuries and mortgages rally this morning on speculation the Federal Reserve will take steps to boost the economy with quantitative easing, buying more government debt to pump more money in the market. Also helping fuel that speculation was a disappointing ADP Employment report showing private employers cut 39,000 positions in September after adding 10,000 in August; the market had predicted an increase of 18,000. Currently mortgage rates for Sonoma County home owners are roughly an 0.125 to 0.25 better in price from yesterday.

Residential mortgage interest rates for Sonoma County residents continue to hover around all time lows. Whether your in the market for a 30 year fixed or 5 year fixed rate ARM you will still find extremely low mortgage rates. But the Gov’t just anounced that they have added 1.6 Trillion, Yes Trillion dollars, to our national deficit, bringing our total debt to right around 13.5 Trillion. UGH!
Soif that is depressing look at it this way…Mortgage Rates just can’t get any lower. I just don’t see how they could. With all this cheap money available to corporations stock piling their reserves, inflation will have to come into the picture which in turn will raise Mortgage interest rates.
And what are you going to do? You have sat around waiting for interest rates to get lower and you have missed the boat. That house you have always dreamed of is now out of your price range becasue lets face it. The cost of that beautiful house in Windsor is not the price…it is the monthly payment.
And if you are sitting on a 5% or higher Mortgage rate thinking that they have to get below 4% before you can Refinance then think again. In most cases, Interest rates only really have to be about 5/8ths lower to have a significant effect on your monthly payment so that it is worth it to refinance.
Call me now and lets figure out just how low these rates really are and how I can help you take advantage of them. 707-328-1233

I just don’t know if they can. Rates as low as 4% for a 30 year fixed loan are virtually unprecedented in our life time. If you are waiting for rates to go lower I just don’t think they are going to. I reveiwed the history of the ten year bond recently and over the last 60 years there has been only one other time the yeilds have been this low and that was during the economic freefall we experienced in 2008. If you look at the average values of real estate in 2006 coupled with the 2 percent higher interest rates and look at the demand then, one can only assume we are at the bottom looking up. Call me with questions or concerns. Happy to help all of Sonoma County home owners. “Hunt for your loan”.

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