New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Milk, bananas, bread, paper towels, mortgages. Yup, add mortgages to your Costco shopping list. It’s true; the USA’s largest warehouse membership chain now offers mortgages.

After a year of testing the waters, Costco is launching a full service mortgage lending program on its website in partnership with New Jersey based commercial bank First Choice Bank, and 10 other lenders.

To date, under the program, Costco partners have issued over 10,000 mortgages. The numbers is expected to soar as the warehouse retailer markets the service more aggressively to its millions of loyal customers in its myriad stores and in its widely circulated publication Connection.

Like others, Costco’s mortgage lending site gathers quotes from a variety of lenders. But, unlike others in the industry, under the Costco program, the borrower’s identity is revealed only after they formally choose the lender.

Costco makes no profit on the lending itself, but it does get paid to market the service.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Mortgage rates fell in the week ending April 12.

Fixed mortgage rates slid a full tenth of a percent in the latest week, and mark the third consecutive week of declines, mortgage giant Freddie Mac reported Thursday

The 15-year fixed rate average hit a new record low of 3.11 percent. That was down from 3.21 percent last week, and way lower than the 4.12 percent one year ago. The previous low for the 15-year was set in March when the average hit 3.13 percent.

The 30-year also headed near its record low of 3.87 percent (set in February), averaging 3.88 percent this week. It has lingered just below 4 percent the last two weeks. At this same period a year earlier, the 30-year averaged 4.91 percent.

The 5-year and 1-year hybrid adjustable rate averages remained relatively unchanged from last week at 2.85 percent and 2.80 percent respectfully.

The drop in mortgage rates was spurred by a disappointing report on jobs growth for the month of March. News that the U.S. economy added just 120,000 jobs renewed fears of whether the economic recovery has legs.

Worries over the mounting and ongoing European debt crisis, coupled with warnings for slowing growth in corporate earnings, also helped push mortgage rates down.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – The rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage climbed above 4 percent for the first time since October, Freddie Mac reported Thursday.

In its weekly report, the mortgage giant noted the average rate on the 30-year fixed rate mortgage increased to 4.08 percent in the week ending March 22. That was up from 3.92 percent in the prior week. A year earlier, the rate rested at 4.81 percent.

The 15-year-fixed rate mortgage rose to 3.30 percent in the latest week. That was up from 3.16 percent in the previous week.

Economists say that mortgage rates are inching higher along with improved economic data, and are catching up with increases in U.S. Treasury bond yields.

The housing market has been showing mixed signs of recovery, and the unemployment situation appears to be improving.

However, higher rates slow mortgage activity.

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Washington, DC, United States (ProPublica) – by Lois Beckett

As we’ve detailed, President Obama’s plans to help homeowners have come up short time and again. We recently looked at Obama’s latest proposals, most of which are unlikely to make a major dent in the crisis.

So, how about the Republican presidential candidates: What do they say should be done about the foreclosure crisis?

They don’t say much. As newspapers in hard-hit states like Florida, Nevada, California and Ohio have been quick to point out, none of the candidates has made the foreclosure crisis a policy priority.

Mostly, the candidates have argued that the housing market needs to heal on its own, without government interference. Rick Santorum and Congressman Ron Paul have suggested tax breaks for some homeowners.

Here’s our in-depth guide to how Santorum, Mitt Romney, Paul and Newt Gingrich say they would approach the issue as president, as well as an evaluation of their claims.

Think we missed an important statement? Let us know.

Rick Santorum: ‘Let capitalism work,’ but let homeowners write off home losses on their taxes.

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has proposed allowing people who owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth to sell their houses and deduct their losses from their taxes.

The details of Santorum’s plan aren’t clear, and the campaign did not respond to our multiple requests for comment.

One tax law expert, James Maule of Villanova University School of Law, said a tax write-off “would not do much for the majority of people who are in financial trouble.”

Right now, taxpayers who sell their primary residences at a loss can’t deduct that loss from their taxes. Changing the tax law wouldn’t do much good, Maule said, because people who are struggling with their mortgages often have little or no income, so giving them a tax deduction actually wouldn’t help.

Other than that, Santorum says we just need to “let capitalism work,” as he put it in a Republican debate in Tampa, Fla., on Jan. 23. “Allow these banks to realize their losses. And create an opportunity for folks who have houses to realize their losses and at least help them out.”

Santorum also has said his plan would help the housing market “find its bottom.”

“This is something I think is important temporarily to put in place to allow people the freedom to be able to go out and get out from underneath these houses that they’re holding onto and at least get some relief from the federal government for doing so,” he said at the Jan. 23 debate.

But according to some experts, housing prices might be close to hitting bottom already — and thus on their way to rebounding already.

It’s also worth noting that a 2007 law provides a tax exemption for homeowners who negotiate debt relief on their mortgages, including through short sales. It’s unclear whether this law and Santorum’s plan might overlap.

Earlier, in Nevada, one of the states where the foreclosure crisis has been most severe, Santorum emphasized “free-market solutions” and cautioned citizens against looking to the government for help. According to CNN, Santorum compared the housing crisis to health care and suggested that, given the opportunity, liberals in government would implement a housing solution like “Obamacare.”

When Santorum and others call for private-sector solutions, they’re largely sidestepping a reality: The mortgage market already relies deeply on government support.

Government-owned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac own or guarantee roughly half of all mortgages in the United States. And while both the Obama administration and Republicans want to scale back government involvement, it’s actually been growing. Fannie and Freddie now guarantee three out of every four new mortgages. Factor in the Federal Housing Administration mortgages guaranteed by Ginnie Mae, and the percentage of mortgages backed by the government is even higher.

Mitt Romney: May be open to some homeowner aid programs but won’t talk specifics.

In a videotaped interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s editorial board in October 2011, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said his approach to addressing the housing market would be: “Don’t try to stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.”

He said the Obama administration had “slow-walked the foreclosure process,” and that the housing market would “turn around and come back up” only when foreclosures go through and those houses are put on the market, sold to investors and then rented.

Romney also has said that repealing the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which introduced new regulations to the mortgage market, would help ease the crisis.

Economist Elliott Parker of the University of Nevada, Reno, told us that while he is not “enamored” with the Dodd-Frank regulation itself, “it is absurd to pretend that repealing Dodd-Frank would work some magic in turning around Nevada’s housing catastrophe.”

“Any time you establish a set of regulations there are unintended consequences,” Parker told the Las Vegas Sun in October. “There may be banks that can’t lend now or some people who can’t get loans. But to offer that as a solution is pretty empty, and it completely ignores the magnitude of the problem that we have today.”

Mark Calabria, the director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute, pointed out that while he agrees with Romney that the housing market needs to heal on its own, the Obama administration’s general approach to the foreclosure crisis was first developed and instituted by President George W. Bush, so it’s not fair to characterize the administration’s programs to help homeowners as a purely Democratic strategy.

“Both Obama and Bush’s housing policies have had relatively small impact. They certainly have not stopped the price decline. They’ve slowed the rate at which this happened,” Calabria said.

Contacted for comment, a Romney campaign spokeswoman emailed a statement saying, “The only real solution to the housing crisis is to get the economy growing again at a healthy rate.” The spokeswoman did not offer details about what plans Romney endorses or opposes.

Despite his “hit the bottom” rhetoric and focus on “private-sector solutions” between banks and homeowners,” some of Romney’s statements suggest that he might actually be open to providing government assistance to homeowners.

As Forbes pointed out recently, Romney was very supportive of Bush’s attempts to aid homeowners in 2008.

“Helping reverse the housing crisis is critical,” he said in 2008, praising Bush’s programs to help homeowners through the Federal Housing Administration. “Loosening those requirements and expanding the ability of FHA to help out homeowners would make a big difference.”

One of Romney’s top economic advisers, economist Glenn Hubbard, released a plan in September suggesting that every homeowner with a Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac government-backed mortgage who is current on mortgage payments should be allowed to refinance his or her mortgage at a low rate.

Romney didn’t endorse the plan but didn’t reject it, either.

“I think the idea of helping people refinance homes to stay in them is one that’s worth further consideration, but I’m not signing on until I find out who’s going to pay and who’s going to get bailed out,” Romney said in October.

In January, when Romney met with a preselected group of struggling Florida homeowners in Tampa, he called their situations “tragic” and said “the banks ought to show greater flexibility in being able to renegotiate with those people who have circumstances that would justify that renegotiation.”

But at the same event, he defended banks that foreclose on homeowners. “The banks are scared to death, of course, because they think they’re going to go out of business,” Romney said. “They’re afraid that if they write all these loans off, they’re going to go broke. And so they’re feeling the same thing you’re feeling. They just want to pretend all of this is going to get paid someday so they don’t have to write it off and potentially go out of business themselves.”

Many investors suspect that Romney is right: While banks continue to list mortgage investments on their balance sheets at their face values, investors worry that because of the struggling housing market and high rates of foreclosure, the actual value of what the banks own is actually far less. If true, banks could face big losses.

Other elements of Romney’s defense of the banks’ role in the foreclosure crisis have been more questionable.

“Now, the banks aren’t bad people. They’re just overwhelmed right now,” Romney said at another event in Florida, according to the Los Angeles Times. “They’re overwhelmed with a lot of things. One is a lot of homes coming in, that are in foreclosure or in trouble, and the other is a massive new pile of regulations.”

Banks may be overwhelmed, but they also recently agreed to a $25 billion settlement over robo-signing and other fraudulent foreclosure practices. We’ve done extensive reporting on how homeowners have suffered from the banks’ deeply dysfunctional loan servicing practices, which continued years after the foreclosure crisis began in 2007 and long before the Dodd-Frank financial regulations became law in 2010.

Ron Paul: Hands-off policy except for tax benefits for those who lose their homes.

Like other Republican candidates, Texas Congressman Ron Paul has advocated a hands-off approach to the foreclosure crisis.

“The best thing you can do is get out of the way, because you want the prices to come down so that people will start buying them again,” he said at the Tampa debate in January.

“Any further federal programs designed to fix prices by pumping credit into the housing market will only compound the damage done by prior interventions,” he said in an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

But Paul also laid out a series of tax benefits that he said would help the residents of Nevada, which is among the states hardest-hit by the foreclosure crisis.

Among these were “providing tax credits to those who have suffered foreclosure” in order to provide an easier path to “new, more affordable housing,” and allowing homeowners “to take a capital-loss deduction if they sell a home for less than they paid for it.”

Paul’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment, making it difficult to compare Paul’s and Santorum’s tax-deduction plans.

It’s worth noting that Paul, unlike Santorum, did warn about the dangers of the mortgage bubble years before it burst. “Like all artificially-created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever. When housing prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty as their equity is wiped out. Furthermore, the holders of the mortgage debt will also have a loss,” Paul told the House of Representatives in 2002, introducing his “Free Market Enhancement Act,” which would have repealed special privileges granted to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Paul also warned that taxpayers would ultimately be forced to bail out investors. Fannie and Freddie are still more than $150 billion in the red after a taxpayer bailout.

Newt Gingrich: ‘Repeal Dodd-Frank.’

Like Romney, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has advocated removing new regulations on the mortgage industry as a way to address the foreclosure crisis.

“If you could repeal Dodd-Frank tomorrow morning, you would see the economy start to improve overnight,” Gingrich said at the January debate in Tampa.

He has not offered much beyond that point. His 21st Century Contract with America mentions the housing crisis only in the context of his goals for repealing Dodd-Frank and reforming the Federal Reserve. In a January interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, he repeated his debate comments almost word for word, adding, “The No. 1 thing that we can do to help the housing market is to strengthen the overall economy.”

– Provided by ProPublica.org

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – If it sounds like you have heard this before you are right. Mortgage rates have fallen once again to a record low.

On Thursday, mortgage giant Freddie Mac reported the average rate on 30-year fixed mortgages fell to 3.89 percent in the current week. That is below the previous record low set three weeks ago of 3.91 percent.

The average on 15-year fixed mortgages inched down to an average 3.16 percent from a record low of 3.21 percent, also set three weeks ago.

Average fixed mortgage rates remained around 4 percent for most of 2011, but the record low rates did little to help the ailing housing market. Banks have been extremely tight with credit, few qualify for the record low rates and other don’t have the money to refinance.

And while foreclosure filings fell in 2011, the declines were attributed to procedural delays.

On a bright note, most experts agree that the worst of the housing market crisis is over.

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Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – Monday morning the Federal Housing Finance Agency announced new rules that will allow many more “underwater” homeowners, those who owe more than their properties are worth, to refinance at current historical low mortgage rates.

Up to a million borrowers are expected to take advantage of the new program, the FHFA estimates. Originally rolled out in early 2009, the program has fallen far short of the number of people it was expected to help.

Prior to the new rules, only borrowers who owed more than 25 percent more than their homes are worth could participate in the program. The new rules have no cap on how much a borrower owes.

Only mortgages backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be eligible under the new rules.

Officials hope the new rules will help the ailing housing market and the flailing economy. By reducing monthly payments, more homeowners will hopefully avoid foreclosure and have more cash to spend, giving a much-needed boost to the depressed economy.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Shorty before 2 p.m. Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up about 75 points, on track for the market to close up for its third consecutive day.

Driving stocks higher was news out of Europe that progress continued to be made in the region’s debt crisis. Also helping stocks were better than expected September sales from domestic retailers and decent job gains.

Earlier in the day, mortgage giant Freddie Mac reported the average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage fell bellow 4 percent for the first time.

Shares of Apple were off about 1 percent, trading at $375 following news that the company’s legendary CEO, Steve Jobs, passed away Wednesday night after a long illness.

Yahoo was active after rumors flew that Microsoft was mulling a bid for the company.

Precious metals were once again looking precious. Gold was up over $8 an ounce, silver was higher by $1.44 and ounce and platinum rose $22. Oil was also rising $2.19 a barrel.

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Yonkers, NY, United States (AHN) – The saying “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” is seemingly true based on a two-year study of the groups. For American households earning less than $50,000 per year, it has been far more difficult on the economic road to recovery than their more affluent counterparts.

For more affluent households, those earning $100,000 or more, economic recovery began as far back as February 2010—when the Consumer Reports Sentiment Index score for this group moved into positive territory (above 50). In that time, sentiment among this affluent group, which represents 18 percent of Americans, has continued to rise and has reached a two-year high of 54.8.

However in the same period, sentiment levels of households earning less than $50,000 bottomed out in October of 2009. Since then, sentiment has barely risen among this group that represents 50 percent of the U.S. population.

“We are seeing a tale of two very different recoveries,” said Ed Farrell, a director of Survey Research at the Consumer Reports National Research Center. “While things have been improving for the wealthiest Americans for some time, lower-income families still have very little to be positive about.”

Analysts believe the disparity in sentiment levels could be attributed to the fact that lower-income households have suffered more pronounced and frequent financial troubles throughout the last two years.

Estimates place the financial suffering among lower-income Americans as being three to five times the level of those earning $100,000 or more over the course of the recession.

One of the biggest areas of disparity between the two groups is in their ability to afford medical coverage and prescription medication. The percentages of home ownership is a clear predictor of the two groups. Ninety percent of affluent households claim to own a home while only half of the lower income group can say the same.

Even now, missed mortgage payments among households earning less than $50,000 have soared, and are approaching 9 percent in June. Among the more affluent Americans, missed mortgage payment claims are below 2 percent and falling.

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They may also give you advice on the amount of loan for you to apply for as most credit counselors would advise you against borrowing more than you could actually afford to pay unless you can see an increase of income in your near future. In many cases, a bad credit report will have a major effect on your finances when you are applying for a home loan. Generally if your credit score is lower than 600, it is probably wise if you attempt to increase your credit score by paying off your credit card debts or any other unsecured debt before you apply for a home loan. Although there are lenders that specialize in bad credit financing, it is always better for you to make sure your credit score is above 600 in order to allow you to obtain an affordable home loan. Most lenders will probably charge you a higher interest rate due to your low credit scores so by increasing your credit scores you can reduce the chances of paying higher interest rates. It may also be a good idea for you to put down a larger down payment for the loan you are applying for.

This will make up for the fact that your credit score is low. By putting down a higher initial payment, your creditors will most likely not charge you a higher interest rate based solely on your credit scores. They are likely to take your large down payment into account and consider a lower monthly payment for you. So it is advisable that you start collecting money for a big down payment to show your creditors that you are financially responsible despite your low credit scores. Some financial advisors would also advise against getting a bad credit home loan with adjustable rate. This is due to the fact that many adjustable rate mortgages start off with a very low interest but as interest rates increase, you might find that you are not able to afford the higher interest rate down the road. It may be wiser to take a loan with lower risks such as a loan with fixed interest rate and fair fees.

By doing so, you might be able to save yourself the headache and stress of trying to figure out ways to keep up with the increasing interest rates of an adjustable rate mortgage. There will also be no surprises in the future as you know you can consistently afford to pay your mortgage at the fixed rate. All in all, it may always be better for you to try to increase your credit scores to above 600 before applying for a home loan if you find yourself in a bad credit situation. It might take you longer than usual or even more hard work on your part, but in the long run you might be saving yourself more money in the future and avoid digging yourself another bad credit hole.

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