Option ARM is still going strong!

Ads I gathered from major news websites on Sept. 8th, 2007.

Sept 2007 - The Option ARM cannot be stopped!

$145,000 Mortgage for Under $499/Month!*

Ad Linked from http://www.yahoo.com/ on Sept. 8, 2007:

LowerMyBills.com

The Fine Print

• *The $483.00 payment is based on the borrower selecting the minimum monthly payment option on a $145,000 adjustable first mortgage loan using a minimum payment interest of 4.00% (which is calculated by taking the actual interest rate minus 3.00%). The actual interest rate is 7.000% with a 7.469% APR.

• By selecting this option, the loan has the potential for negative amortization. The minimum payment does not cover all of the interest that is owed for the month and, therefore, you will incur deferred interest that is added on to the balance of the mortgage. You may make the minimum monthly payment for up to 5 years or until your new mortgage balance is 115% of the original mortgage amount. The borrower also has the option of making an interest-only payment or making principal and interest payments amortized over 30 years. For example, if the borrower selects to make principal and interest payments amortized over 30 years, the monthly payment will be $964.69. These terms are available for first mortgage loans. To qualify for this monthly payment, the property must be owner occupied single family residence and a loan-to-value ratio of 80%. Credit restrictions may apply. Rate is variable and subject to change daily without notice.

• Social Security Number is required for home purchase.

• LowerMyBills, Inc. is not acting as a lender or broker. The information provided by you to LowerMyBills is not an application for a mortgage loan, nor is it used to pre-qualify you with any lender. If you are contacted by a lender or broker advertising within our network, your quoted rate may be higher, depending on your property location, credit score, loan-to-value ratio, debt-to-income ratio, and other factors. Not available in all states. Not all service providers in the LowerMyBills network offer this or other products with interest-only options.

Accredited Home Lenders to fire 65% of employees and stop loan originations!

Remember - Accredited was considered to be the most financially sound Sub Prime lender!

Lessons Learned:

• Being the "best of the worst" still means you are pretty bad
• #1 IPO of 2003 on Nasdaq. Short-term success, long-term failure
• If your business doesn't benefit the consumer in the long-run (3o years), it might not be around. Foreclosures and late payments are not beneficial to the consumer
• They had much higher rates than all of the other Sub Prime lenders. When pricing for risk - higher rates don't mean squat if you are over the consumer's threshold to pay.
• As far as I know, they did not do the Option ARMs. Types of loans that they did do: Stated Income, 100% financing ARMs

Sample Guidelines during 2005/2006:

• 580 Credit Score - Full Documentation (W-2's) - 100% financing loan
• 620 Credit Score - Stated Income - 100% combo financing loan
• 600 Credit Score - 1 day out of Bankcruptcy, 90 days late on mortgage, Full Doc - 100% financing loan
• They required more credit tradelines and rental verification than most other companies for these credit score thresholds.

Ethics:

• Heads of Corporate admitted that they had a former employee in 2004/2005 who closed multi-million dollars of loans per month actively committing fraud (creating false income documents) on a certain percentage of these. Employee was fired and began to work for another company. As far as I know, this was not reported to authorities. At least they fired him...

Source: http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070822/accredited_home_lenders_restructuring.html?.v=2
Source: http://www.accredhome.com/

Link to my Interest-Only Video

It "Pays" to Pay Down Your Mortgage Early

Here is a numerical analysis of a $400,000 loan at 7% interest during your first year:

Type........Monthly Payment........Approx. Principal Paid per month

Option ARM.........$1286 (@1%).......................-$1047

Interest-Only........$2333 ..............................$0

50-year ..............$2406 ..............................$75

40-year .............$2485 ...............................$150

30-year .............$2661 ...............................$330

15-year .............$3595 ...............................$1270

Learning Points

1. Notice that the interest-only is the same as an "infinite-year" loan. So, if someone tells you that you are getting a 100-year loan, it is almost the same as interest only.
2. By underpaying your 30-year $400,000 mortgage by $200/month, you are adding on 10 more years of payments.
3. Conversely, by overpaying your 30-year mortgage by $200/month, you are happily losing 5 years of payments.
4. You are barely paying down any principal the first few years of a long-term mortgage.
5. A 15-year mortgage is about just as good as an Option ARM mortgage is bad.

Link to my Option ARM Video

Please note - $2661 was assumed to be interest-only payment for this video at 00:15 seconds...so, it should of been 8% fully indexed rate instead of 7%. Doesn't change much, just that one slide...I caught it too late. Sorry...

What Mortgage Disclosures Should Look Like!

Borrower Smith - Loan Amount $400,000
Property Value (subject to change) $450,000

Type of Loan: Option ARM

Year/Month.......... Payment............... Due Date
Jan 2008............... $1400............... 1/31/2008
Feb 2008............... $1400............... 2/31/2008
Mar 2008............... $1400............... 3/31/2008
...
...
Jan 2011............... $3200............... 1/31/2011
Feb 2011............... $3200............... 2/31/2011
...
...
Dec 2037............... $3200............... 12/31/2037


30 years of 12 months = 360 lines long


This solves the problem of people not being able to do math with interest rates. It assumes a fixed interest rate, but you get the idea.

Understanding the Mortgage Crash

The Mortgage Crash

PART I
What happened: Money was being loaned to people who couldn't repay their loans in the long-run. Only the sub prime loans went bad so far ($212 billion delinquent through May, AP), which are people with poor credit.

What will happen: Option ARMs, Interest-Only ARMs (Adjustable Rate Mortgages) will far exceed sub prime losses. Last year, over 12% (Business Week) of all loans were Option ARMs (these are not sub prime loans!) - much more than sub prime loans ( I think they are around 5% or so - not sure). Jim Cramer said on Mad Money after talking to execs that 7 million American homeowners will foreclose (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWksEJQEYVU)

What are Option ARMs: In short, if you are supposed to pay $2500 - $3000 per month (7%) on your mortgage for a 30 year fixed loan - instead, you pay about $1500 (1% or 2% interest) and that extra $1000 - $1500 adds on to the balance of your loan each month. After a few years, the loan resets and you have a new payment more than double your original. These are worse than Interest-Only, which are bad too. And all are little or no money down.

Who has them: People with good credit who can't afford a normal loan. Like a 25-year old just getting the "American Dream." Up to 80% of all option ARM borrowers make only the minimum payment each month (Fitch Ratings).


Sources:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_37/b4000001.htm
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070811/ap_on_bi_ge/toxic_mortgages;_ylt=AmQpBPmCcyfR2DdL

PART II

End of easy credit: Banks borrow and swap money from each other, and national bank (Fed, European Central Bank, Japanese recently added $billions to the market to promote "liquidity"). They borrow at low rates (i.e. LIBOR - London Inter Bank Offer Rate or lower using swaps) so that you can be given a loan at a slightly higher rate for a home, school, or whatever. Well, people stopped paying back the loans, investors lost their money, and won't give anymore money for banks to borrow so that you can get a loan. U.S. mortgage investors are all over the world in Europe and a very large percentage in Asia - they were lured by high returns from higher interest rates on these loans (similar to Argentine financial crisis of 2001 where investors bought bad government bond debt with high interest rates and Europeans had no clue what they were buying, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15438-2003Aug2?language=printer). Fed recently put some money in the system - to continue business and the global market (Using "Federal Funds") by having banks borrow and swap federal funds. ...

Risk: Only the sub prime thing has hit. Option ARMs, Interest-Only, and regular ARMs have not hit yet.

• The Option-ARMs will not pay - I guarantee you, I've seen hundreds of those loans and spoken to 50-100 loan officers who sold them. It only takes 1 bad mortgage loan to ruin a portfolio of 10-20 good ones depending on home prices.
  
• Home values have gone way down - people cannot refinance out of these loans. I spoke to someone at Countrywide (20% of all mortgages in U.S. last year) yesterday who confirmed the inability of these people to refinance - appraisal values aren't there. Nobody wants to give a loan for something that is more than it is worth.

Financial Engineering:

• Global GDP (all goods and services for all countries) is between $60 billion and $65 trillion. (Economist, IMF, CIA Factbook). U.S. is about 10 to 12 trillion for GDP and U.S. mortgage industry accounted for $3 trillion in 2003.
  
• Outstanding global interest-rate derivatives and other derivatives are over $300 trillion - 5 times GDP (Economist). Basically, a bunch of international financial institutions and hedge funds wrote loans/paper/agreements worth much more (300 trillion) than actually exists (60 to 65 trillion) with leveraged money.
  
• One mistake hurts a lot more. These include Mortgage-Backed Securities. A small part of leveraged derivatives were sub prime loans and look what happened with a small part of leveraged money when people had to pay up. Int'l banks have more financial power than Federal central bank's whose primary goal is to limit inflation by changing the short term interest rate.
• Google "George Soros" and the Bank of England to understand this.

Who's to Blame (in order): In my opinion:

1. Hedge funds - bundled hundreds of similar mortgages together and sold them to investors. Convinced investors they were good buys and rapidly sold worse and worse loans.
   
2. Mortgage Executives - worked with hedge fund types to do more risky loans because investors kept on buying them. They knew these loans were trash. They made a lot of money.
   
3. Joe Homeowner or low mortgage salesperson - Some people just wanted to buy a house and sell it for a profit in 2 years. Other salespeople misdirected people who didn't know the loan would explode later. But, Joe Homeowner signed it. These low payments caused house values to increase over the past few years...cuz you were only paying half of what you should have been despite increasing interest rates. And the 20 year-old mortgage loan officer was making 20k+ a month.
   
4. Government Regulators - No regulation existed to combat these practices. But, then again, hedge funds are "private equity" firms and are not regulated by definition. Maybe, they didn't know. But, all mortgage lenders are licensed with the gov't.