Searchlight Crusade

Every so often, someone who thinks they’re a wit sends me a copy of The Rules For Relationships According To Women. Unlike those rules, which might have been funny around the time Nefertiti was a debutante, these rules are real and they are not based upon caprice.

Very recently, I was walking through a grocery store parking lot and heard someone screaming on their cell phone, “It wasn’t my fault! The broker told me not to make that payment, and then they didn’t pay the loan off on time!” Which leads me to Rule Number One: It is YOUR responsibility to make all payments on time. Nobody else. Your name is on that contract, not theirs. Under text that says essentially, “I agree to repay this loan on these terms.” When you are in the process of refinancing or selling, make it a point to keep paying that mortgage on time and in full. The worst thing that will happen is that you will get a check back a couple weeks later. Whereas if you blow the payment off, you are taking the risk, as happened to this person, that some incompetent person doing your new loan will not get the loan done in time to make the payment date. On the sixteenth, there’s a penalty due. On the thirty-first day, it hits your credit, where it can conceivably make a difference of 150 points. And if the lender is getting ready to fund the loan the next day and runs your credit then and sees your drop, the terms of your loan just got worse, if they can fund the loan at all. It is the mark of a bad loan officer to tell you not to make your payments. A good one will specifically tell you to continue to make payments on time. I haven’t blown a rate lock in a very long time, but there’s always the possibility it might happen and the loan takes longer than I think it will. Don’t let it happen to you. Make your payments on time, whatever you’re doing.

Corollary to Rule Number One: You are responsible for getting it to them. All of this nice convenient stuff about mailing a check or sending the payment online is quite a convenience, but they do not legally have to do it. Your grandparents had to walk the check (or the money) in every month. You can still do this if your lender has branches and you suddenly remember on the 15th that you forgot to make your mortgage payment. Many lenders are very forgiving about this. But they don’t have to be,

If that payment doesn’t get made on time, it is your fault. End of discussion. If you mailed it off on time and it got lost in the mail, you are the one that owes the penalty. If you transferred the money online, and it somehow doesn’t get credited to the right account, it is your fault. These don’t happen often, but they do happen. The lenders are actually pretty forgiving about it, provided you can convince them that the payment was made. You have a receipt, a canceled check, something that says you made the payment in full and on time. If you’re good enough about paying on time, sending the check on the first even though it’s not officially late until the 16th, they’re pretty forgiving about checks that get lost. On the other hand, if you are always paying on the last possible day, the lender is going to regard that late fee as the least they are due. While you are at it, always include something with your account number on it when you send the money. Write it on the check, include a coupon, put it in comments. Otherwise the lender could conceivably end up misapplying the funds of the check, especially if they figure to use the address on the check, and you’re making a payment on another property. Most of the time they do get it right. But if they don’t, it’s your fault. If they get the payment with all of the necessary information and misapply it, that’s their fault. If they didn’t get it, on time or at all, or missing some important information, it’s your fault.

There is no rule two, at least that I can think of right now. There is only one rule, but you violate it at your extreme disadvantage.

Caveat Emptor

We have several rental properties that we own (more than 10). When we were younger, before we got married, we both moved around a lot and bought houses, moved, stayed a year or so and did it again. I of course don’t have to mention why we did this (no money down, low fixed rates, etc.) However, now I am running into a dilema. I am finding that no one wants to refi or do purchase money loans now that we have 10+ mortgages. I need good rates to make my cash flow work. I have recently herniated one of my discs and have been out of work for almost 3 months, so I need to take money out of our house that is paid for, but no one wants to do it. Any suggestions on how to get around that? My credit scores range from 763-805, so that is defintaely not the problem. Any advice would be greatly appreciated as I am down to crunch time in needing to get some money.

Tough situation.

The reason for this problem is that whereas nationally, vacancy rates are much higher, and here in high cost California they are only running about 4 percent, the bank will only allow 75 percent of rent to be used in the calculation of whether you qualify or do not (debt to income ratio). Furthermore, on the liabilities side they charge the full payment, taxes, and homeowner’s insurance, as well as maintenance. To “pile on”, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac won’t buy loans where the applicant has more than ten loans, period. But note that this is ten loans, not ten properties. If you consolidate them, you dodge that issue.

Here in the high cost areas of California there was a while where it was unheard of for a recent purchase rental to be turning a positive cash flow, at least according to “lender math”. But for properties purchased a decade ago here as well as right now, and nationally in many markets, there are people making money hand over fist on rental properties whom the bank believes must be cash destitute. There is no way they will qualify for a mortgage loan without tweaking something.

There are two main ways to solve the problem.

10 mortgages (assuming you still own the properties) gives one serious status as a real estate investor. The loan should then be able to be done. Not necessarily A paper, but subprime with that kind of a credit score and a prepayment penalty will give them comparable – perhaps even better rates. Furthermore, on investment properties, there’s a minimum of about a 1.5 point to 2 point hit on the loan costs just due to the fact that it is investment property. So refinancing an investment property is not something you want to do often. If you can’t go 10 years between refinances, something is probably wrong. Especially given the extremely narrow spread between long term loans like the 30 year fixed rate loan and shorter term fixed rate hybrids, for investment property a 30 year fixed rate loan is likely the way to go.

The alternative is to go with a commercial loan. Commercial loans are much easier than residential, and they will allow a real estate investor to qualify where they wouldn’t under residential rules. However, the rates are both much higher and variable (“Prime plus margin”) rather than fixed.

But the key part is “real estate investor.”

This is a business. You’re going to need an accountant to attest to the fact that you’ve been operating this business at least two years. But that gives you standing as at least partially self-employed as the operator of a real estate investment business.

Which once upon a time gave you an out to do stated income, possibly even A paper. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case – one more instance in which people who abused stated income really ruined the market. You’re going to have to state that you earn more income than you do. There are no longer stated income loans available from any source that I am aware of. Given the environment today, a good loan officer looking to cover themselves is going to want you to acknowledge that you can make whatever the payment is really going to be. I don’t care if you need $6000 per month to qualify and you tell me that you make $12,000 per month, or $120,000. Any time you are looking at stated income, you’re looking at a situation that is vulnerable to abuse, both from the point of view of a consumer being put into a loan they really cannot afford, and from the point of view of a bank lending money based upon a credit score and source of income that really may not be there. This one is especially vulnerable to the latter concern in the current market, and I would likely take a real careful look at any bank statements that pass through my hands to make certain it’s not patently disprovable. If it makes a borrower uneasy, well half of the reason is to protect them. Stated Income may have been colloquially called “liar’s loans”, but that is not what they are intended for, and in this case you are intentionally overstating income in order to qualify under unrealistic underwriting rules.

The second approach was NINA – a No Income, No Asset loan, also known as “no ratio” – meaning no debt to income ratio. These were much easier to do for the loan officer, as they’re completely driven off credit score, but carried still higher rates, and unfortunately, despite these being less fraudulent, I no longer have any idea of where to find one outside of “hard money” loans carrying interest rates above 12%.

The only general solution available today is a portfolio loan. If you really do make a million dollars a year from something else, you can get a loan on any number of properties from a lender who holds the loan in their own name rather than trying to sell it to Fannie and Freddie. This begs the question of how you make the money or where it comes from, but it is possible. Nor can your lender de-fund existing loans unless it’s for a reason allowed in the Note (loan contract)

There always was serious potential for abuse in this situation, a potential that lenders were willfully refusing to see back in the Era of Make Believe Loans, but now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. The lenders are now so paranoid about these loans for which there is good reason and a valid market for existence, that these markets are going completely unserved. Self-employed people and commissioned salesfolk have to file taxes, also, and tax forms are the preferred method for documenting income. Nonetheless, because there are significant deductions that would not otherwise be allowed due to the fact that these professions are largely paying bills with “before tax” money whereas most folks are paying with “after tax” money, people in such professions needed the alternative documentation methods in order to qualify for loans. With those alternate methods all but non-existent now, people in many professions (including real estate agents and mortgage loan officers) are finding it difficult to get loans at all. There always was the danger of talking yourself into a loan that you could not really afford, but while lenders were being willfully blind to it until recently, now they’ve got an obsession with avoiding that market completely. I am sure that business models will spring up allowing that loan market to be served within a another year or two, but in the meantime it’s going to be really hard for people who are confined to that market to get a loan.

Caveat Emptor

One of the things I’m seeing a lot of these days is blanket advice on bridge loans.

A bridge loan is a loan that you take out with the explicit intention of having it be short term. The most common situation is a loan against property A, which you own but plan to sell, so that you can put a down payment on property B (or buy it outright) right now.

The motivation for this comes from the fact that people get paid to do bridge loans, and they are typically very easy loans to do. Frankly, the people making the recommendation make more money by doing the bridge loan than by not doing it, and they are not motivated to do the calculations and legwork to see which is the better deal for the consumer.

When it comes to money, blanket recommendations of any sort are automatically suspect, and usually wrong. Every situation is different, and there can be factors that cause an ethical professional to recommend something in one case where they would recommend against in another superficially similar one.

Bridge loans are no exception. In the example above, the advantage is that they make you a more qualified buyer, and can get you better rates on the loan for the new property. The disadvantage is that their closing costs are just as high as any other loan. So you’re spending about $3500 extra plus points plus junk fees (if any). They are also, by definition, cash out refinances. The rate-cost tradeoff for cash-out refinances is less favorable than for purchase money loans. In plain English, they cost more.

The next major issue that arises is that they can make it more difficult to qualify for the loan on the new property, which can often mean that you need to go stated income or NINA when you might otherwise have qualified full documentation, which means you got a higher rate on the new property anyway, and that you’re going to want to refinance your new purchase as soon as Property A sells anyway, sending another set of loan costs down the drain. Don’t get me wrong, I love to do loans, and my pocketbook loves for me to do loans, but it’s a good loan officer’s job to look after your interests first.

Finally, choosing a bridge loan can force a choice upon you: A good loan that puts you in the position of having a need to sell within a specified time frame, and a mediocre loan that may not. The best (lowest) rates are for short term loans. Always have been, always will be. However, if the market sours, this can cause you to either accept an offer you would not have otherwise considered, or flush another set of closing costs down the toilet, when if you had chosen the mediocre loan, you would have been okay indefinitely.

Let’s crunch some numbers. Let’s say you have a property currently worth $250,000 that you bought for $125,000 and have paid down to $100,000. You want to upgrade to a $400,000 property now that your promotion and raise have settled in.

The first thing you do is pull cash out to 80 percent. On a 30 day lock of a 30 year conforming fixed rate loan, assuming you’ve got good credit, when I originally wrote this was about a 6.5 rate without points, and you’ll actually get about $96,500 of that $100,000 you take out. I looked at shorter term fixed rate loans as well, but with the yield curve inverted right now since you’re planning to sell, anything without a prepayment penalty is about the same, and a prepayment penalty is contra-indicated, as it means you’ll have to pay thousands of dollars when you do sell.

You take and put that $96500 down on a new home purchase loan on a $400,000 home. It’s over 20% down, so no PMI concerns, and no splitting into a second loan. But because you’ve got that $200k loan sitting over there, now you have to go stated income on the loan for the new home.

Actually, at this update, I don’t know of any stated income loans. What that means is there’s no way to qualify without coming up with more cash or waiting for the first property to sell. This means moving twice or hoping your buyer will let you lease the property back long enough to find a new property. Or simultaneous closings, a massively stress-inducing plan, because you’re betting your ability to close on someone else being on-the ball.

But when we had it, stated income was one way of making this work. This means you traded no verification of income for a higher rate/cost tradeoff. In the example we’re using, your rate would have been about 6.75 without points. Soak off another $3500 in loan costs, plus purchase costs of maybe another $1000. You now have two loans, one for $200k at 6.5 and one for about $312,000 at 6.75. Now the original home sells. Let’s say you got full value of $250,000. You pay 5% in real estate commission, and maybe 2% more in other costs. That’s $17,500, so you get $32,500 in your pocket. You have three choices, two of them productive. You can 1) Spend the money, 2) Invest the money, or 3) Use it on the other mortgage. A paydown, where you just plop the money down and keep making your same old current payment is a good idea (Unless there’s a “first dollar” prepayment penalty), but most folks are obsessed with lowering their payment. So they take that $32,500, and of which $3500 is loan expenses, and (because now they can do full documentation), they end up with something like a $283,000 loan at 6.25 percent, assuming rates don’t move. Total cost of loans: $10,500 assuming you pay no points for any of your loans. Perhaps possible for someone with above average credit. Not likely if your credit is below average.

Suppose instead, that you just leave that $100,000 loan sit on your original property. You’re still going to have to do stated income on the new loan on the new property. But instead, you go with a 80 percent first, 15 percent second (another thing you can’t do at the update because no second mortgage holder will go over 90% loan to value ratio) because you can come up with $25,000 until the first property sells. Same 6.75 rate on the first, and the second is an interest only at about 10.25, just to use the same lender whose sheet I happened to pull from the stack for the exercise. Loan costs, $4000 without points, which I priced the loan to avoid. First house sells, you get $132,500, replace the $25,000, and pay off that second, leaving you a $320,000 loan and about $47,500, holding cost assumptions constant ($1000 in non-loan costs). You could do a paydown, leaving $272,500 balance on a 6.75 loan, or you could take $3500 in closing costs and refinance to 6.25, just as above, leaving a balance of $276,000 if you don’t pay any points. Total loan costs, $7500 and you only have to avoid paying points twice (once, as opposed to twice, if you take the paydown option. It takes a little under 37 months to break even on your interest savings). Furthermore, in less than hot markets, it gives you greater leverage with your seller to pay some part of your closing costs: “Do this, or I don’t qualify”. They have the home on the market for a reason, and they can help the buyer in hand or they can hope for another buyer to come along.

In this example, not doing a bridge loan saves you about $6500, less the additional interest (about $512/month) for the second mortgage until your first home sells, but plus approximately $541 per month interest every month between the time you initially refinance your original property and the time it finally sells, a longer period of time. Plus one set of possible mortgage points. So it’s not difficult to construct scenarios where it’s a good idea not to.

Let’s look at a different scenario, however. Let’s say instead of upgrading, you’re already in the $400,000 home, and looking to downsize to a $100,000 condo. Furthermore, let’s say you bought for $200,000 and are now down to $160,000 owed, just to keep the proportions consistent. You borrow out to $265,000 (paying $3500 in loan costs), which you qualify for full doc at 6.25. You then pay cash for the condo (including $1000 for purchase transaction costs, and you’ve still got $500 in your pocket). Furthermore, an all cash, no contingency transaction is a powerful negotiating tool for a seller to give you a good price. Then when your original property sells, costing you say 7%, or $28,000, in selling costs. You net $107,500 in your pocket. If you did no bridge loan, let’s still assume you can come up with $25,000 on the short term, and you still qualify full documentation. Your rate on the condo is 6.375 without points, holding assumptions consistent. Then you sell the first property for the same $400k, paying the same 7% ($28,000) and paying off the $80,000 loan on the condo as well as replacing the $25,000. Net still $107,500 in your pocket, less additional interest charges for a little longer period, but you cut your stress level and put yourself in a stronger bargaining position, which is likely to be worth doing.

There are any number of reasons and factors to do a bridge loan or not to do a bridge loan. You may not have a minimum down payment without a bridge loan. That’s probably the most common, as not all properties and purchases are eligible for 100 percent financing (at this update, the only way I know to get 100% financing is with a VA loan, and some require as much as a forty or even fifty percent down. The way a necessary transaction is structured. The presence or absence of 1035 exchange considerations is often a factor. Your credit score may limit you, or your ability to qualify full documentation may dictate the advantage lies in a different direction. Every situation has the potential for factors that may dictate an answer other than that given by pure numerical computation, and there are therefore, no valid blanket answers to the question of whether or not to do a bridge loan.

Caveat Emptor

Thanks again for the terrific posts. I’ve learned more about mortgages in the past two months than I ever dreamed I might. I am looking to buy my first home soon, and have myself in a good credit position to do so. My credit score is over 800 and I have no back-end debt – no car payments, alimony, student loans, etc. My annual salary is well over $100K, and while my down payment will not be as much as I would like, I should be able to put up 20% of the purchase price. Before I shop for a loan, I have some questions and would appreciate your insight. 1. Do monthly “subscriptions” such as landline phone bill, cable, internet, cell phone, etc. come into consideration? As I have no cell phone and no cable (and don’t intend to get them), I see my monthly expenses in this regard as significantly lower than most other borrowers. 2. Do my retirement savings come into play? I have saved conscientiously for several years and between IRA’s and pension funds (fully vested) I have a significant amount put away. Thanks again for the teachings

Gosh, I didn’t think a dream client like this existed any more!

In general, there are only three instances when reserves really come into play. They are:

1) Stated Income. Since people in this category were not documenting their income, for a true stated income loan they are looking for evidence that these folks are living within your means. The measurement that has evolved is six months PITI (Principal Interest Taxes and Insurance) in a form where you can get to it – savings accounts, investments, something. If you have a retirement account, such as a 401, IRA or similar, most lenders will allow you to use a discounted amount, most often 70 percent, as the money would require the payment of taxes and penalties. Roth IRAs may be treated differently, as the rules are different. There were Stated Income Stated Assets loan programs, but when you get right down to it, those loans look more like heavily propagandized NINA (No Income, No Assets, aka No Ratio loans) than they did a true Stated Income. (at this update, I am unaware of any lender who is actually funding stated income loans of any sort)

2) Payment shock. If your payments are going to be much higher than rent was (or previous payments were), many lenders will require two to three months reserves of PITI payments in reserves.

3) Cash to close. No matter what the loan, the underwriter is going to be looking at the loan to make certain that you have the cash to close, and any reserve requirements are in addition to this. If your loan is going to require a certain amount of cash, either in the form of down payment or loan costs or most often, for prepaid interest or an escrow account, then the underwriter wants to see evidence you’ve got it. It’s no good for the bank for the loan to be approved, the documents printed and signed, the notary paid, and then the loan doesn’t close because you didn’t really have the cash. Seller paid closing costs are getting to be a really touchy point with many lenders, by the way, as they indicate the property may not really be worth the ostensible sales price.

In any of these cases, the underwriter is going to want to see evidence as to where the money came from. They want to know that you’ve either built it up over time or have had it for quite some time or that you can document where you got it from. What they are looking at with these requirements is the possibility that you got a loan from somewhere that you’re going to have to pay back, and the payments on which may mean you no longer qualify under Debt to Income ratio guidelines.

Mind you, it never hurts to have money socked away. But it’s not worth any huge amount of contortions to prove. For A paper lenders, the guidelines are razor sharp, and excessive reserves are not a part of them. You’ve either got the required amount or you don’t, and the fact that you have $100 million in investment accounts isn’t relevant – and it may cause some underwriters to start wondering why you’re not paying for the property in cash or putting more of a down payment (Anytime you give an underwriter more information than required, you run the risk that they will ask you difficult questions about it). Some subprime lenders may approve a loan they would not otherwise have approved, or maybe offer better terms than they might otherwise, but there have been enough adverse experiences with this that it is becoming more rare.

Monthly subscriptions (utilities, etcetera) are why the permissible debt-to-income ratio (DTI) isn’t higher. You can cancel cable TV, you can cancel dish network, you can cancel pay per view, you can cancel magazines, although most folks want phone, gas, and electricity. Utilities etcetera do not count against debt to income. Only the payments on actual debt count.

Caveat Emptor