| Refinancing: Don't Waste Time Wondering, Just Do It
If you're not changing the term of your loan ... even dropping your rate by an eighth makes sense because you did not have to change anything to get a loan," says Bob Walters, chief economist for Quicken Loans. "It always pays to get a lower rate." Say the current balance of your 6.5%, 30-year fixed mortgage is $250,000 and you are making monthly payments of $1,580. If you refinance into a loan of the same size that's one percentage point lower, 5.5%, you've dropped your monthly payments by about $160 to $1,420. But let's say you want to take out extra cash to pay off $20,000 in credit card debt: You'll need a new loan of $270,000. And even with that higher amount, your monthly payments are still reduced about $50 from your current payments to $1,533 a month. To determine how your monthly mortgage payments will differ under a new loan, use a mortgage-refinance calculator to determine the savings you might receive.
Bush says faith beat alcohol habit
Bush says faith beat alcohol habit President talks frankly about 'addiction,' meets with two graduates of church support project. Jennifer Loven / Associated Press BALTIMORE -- President Bush is talking more openly about his old drinking habit, and on Tuesday he offered perhaps his most pointed assessment yet by saying plainly that the term "addiction" had applied to him. "Addiction is hard to overcome. As you might remember, I drank too much at one time in my life," Bush said during a visit to the Jericho Program, a project of Episcopal Community Services of Maryland that helps former prisoners deal with problems such as drug addiction, finding jobs and reintegrating productively into society. Bush spoke to reporters after meeting privately with two men who have graduated from Jericho's program and dealt with drug problems.
Subprime loan crisis sparking action from lawmakers
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) - Tony Brooks blames a mortgage broker for the loss of his home, and wanted state lawmakers to know his story.Brooks, 48, drove twice to Olympia from Seattle in the span of a week to testify for a crackdown on brokers, even after he was turned away by a Senate committee the first time."There are predatory lenders out there ripping off people with subprime loans," Brooks said. "By me going down there, they will see somebody that it happened to."Mortgage brokers are in the cross-hairs of some of the measures in the Legislature's response to fears that the subprime loan crisis will soon hit the state hard. As the housing market weakens across the country, the hardest hit have been borrowers of subprime loans, typically people who don't meet the credit standards for a conventional loan.
The Search Party
Brin did meet with Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, and they spoke about “network neutrality"—an effort that Google and other companies are making to insure that the telephone and cable companies that provide high-speed access to the Internet don't favor one Web site over another. Around the time of Brin's visit, an organization called Hands Off the Internet, financed in part by telecommunications companies, ran full-page newspaper advertisements in which it accused Google of wanting to create a monopoly and block “new innovation"; one ad featured a grim photograph of a Google facility housing a sinister-looking “massive server farm." Brin recognized it as a warning. “I certainly realized that we had to think about these things, and that people were going to misrepresent us," he said.
|
