eloan

This is a great book for learning different questions to ask your lender so that you can get the deal that is best for you. It also tells you different companies and programs that you can contact to get on a little or no money down program. This was an extremely helpful book. It completely covered the loan part of buying a home. If you have questions about other aspects of buying a home this book won't really help that much. For that get Home Buying for dummies. Between the two you can answer all of your own questions!

As no one had written a review of this book when I purchased it, I bought it based on the title alone; but don't let it fool you. It's not 300 pages on buying a home with little or no money down alone, as I would have thought, and primarily what I bought it for. Most of the chapters are simply about buying a house.

There is helpful and thorough information about figuring out how much house you can afford, credit, tax savings, home owners insurance, mortages, what to look for if inspecting the house yourself, etc. There are also many helpful sample and example forms such as House Closing/Refinance Data and Gift Letters. Also provided are tables that calculate credit ratings, mortages, etc. There are sample lists of what to look for at each viewing and sample tables of how to compare all of the properties. The book is riddled with "Example", "Note", "Caution", and "Tip" asides that help to explain, warn, and advize. Also, at the end of each chapter is a chapter summary, which is nice, because if you're not sure if you need to read the entire chapter or not, you can read the chapter summary first and decide then if you need more information. Each chapter is not set up like a novel either, which is also nice. It's broken down into smaller sections with informative headings so you really don't need to read the entire book to pinpoint the information you want.

One of the most helpful parts of this book is the glossary in the back of the book. We are first time home buyers, and I am not familiar with much of the terminology of home buying, so I found the glossary helpful in understanding what I was reading.

Now to the point of the book, buying a house with little or no money down. There is no "true" way to buy a house with no money down. You still need several thousand dollars in closing fees. There are two chapters in this book about "no" money down. Chapter 7 is called "Mom and Dad (Or a Good Friend) Give the Down Payment" and discusses taxes, shows sample forms to use, and gives tips and examples to help. Chapter 8 is called "Borrow the Downpayment from Family or Friends". This chapter discusses types of loans, interest rates, collateral, security, etc and provides an example of a form you would use if you chose to borrow the money from family or friends.

Chapter 10, "FHA Insured Mortgages", is what I was hoping this book would be all about, because of the title. If you are buying this book soley for information on buying a house with little money down, you will find that this is the most helpful chapter. (In addition to the FHA mortages, the author provides names, numbers, and websites for other agencies to go to that offer 3% or less down payments.) The author discusses how FHA morgages work, how much of a down payment you will need (1.25-2.85% depending on the area), benefits and drawbacks, how to qualify, and probably most importantly, how to obtain one. Just like the rest of the book there are "Tip"s and "Caution"s and tables to help explain.

Although I was disappointed that this book is not ALL about buying a house with little or no money down, as the title implies, there is lots of very useful, helpful, informative information in this book. However, no one book has everything. I would recomend, "100 Questions Every First-TIme Home Buyer Should Ask" by Ilyce R. Glink in addition to this book to any first-time home buyer out there.

Happy House Hunting! :-)

one must read this book. This book is a great experience of every reader who can go throughly.

This book is an excellent source for obtaining a comprehensive knowledge of the mortgage industry. Whether you are a prospective home buyer seeking to save money on a mortgage, or seeking knowledge and training for a job in the mortgage industry, this book tells just about all there is to know about the important points of financing a home. This book is written in language that just about anyone can understand, and if it is followed with relative care from beginning to end, a strong foundation of mortgage industry knowledge can be obtained. This book is written from the standpoint of empowering home-buyers with valuable, unbiased knowedge of the industry, and I highly recommend it for this purpose as I use the knowledge contained in it every day.

Here you'll find information about credit availability in Mexico during the 90's for poor people. Good references but not many data in the text. A recommended reading if you are interested in credit - formal and informal - in developing countries.

Superb book with timeless ideas for investors. Structured before appreciation disappeared, Glubetich shows how to allow property to pay itself down quickly to take advantage of the least used technique--fast equity build-up from mortgage paydowns. Many other exciting, unique, profitable ideas. GK Gibso

This is a must read and good reference book for mortgage professionals, including lenders and practitioners in secondary mortgage business. The book gives excellent review of the development of residential lending in US, of government regulations, major market players, and important product types. Then the book gets to the details of mortgage lending processes and also touches the secondary markets. Readers can definitely gain valuable and practical knowledge on residential lending business after walk through the book.

I find this book a good read for those who know that they want to enter the Morgage Lending Field. It gives you an excellent overview of mortgage lending from the time a Loan Originator takes your loan application to the time your loan is serviced or sold. If you are not sure what area you want to work in, after reading this book you will know that there are many careers in front of and behind the scenes. Also, you can open your career horizons to private mortgage lenders or even government entities that assist in providing mortage services and fiancing. Having worked in the industry for over five years, I highly recommend this book.

If you like Limbaugh or hate him, this is a "must have" book. Get the straight story on Rush's draft deferement, the debt he owes to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Disk Jockey Larry Lujack. Colford is a serious journalist and does a fine job of shucking this particular ear of American corn.

There are more than a dozen full-page ads throughout this, showing in pictures the enormous capacity at "1:29 AM, Memphis, Tennessee. Fleet ready for loading at main hub" (p. 9) and other aspects of "the largest all-cargo air fleet in the world" (p. 9) that reinforce the feeling that everybody needs to have lots of money or this country's bankers won't be the only unhappy people in the world. In a *GO JET* world, the final picture, with a caption, "working to meet the needs of business throughout the world," (on the page after 94), might even be uplifting after a text which urges, "People had better start to find their voice for the emerging debate" (p. 94) about regulating our financial institutions again, so this "Larger Agenda Series" text seems like a hardcover magazine with one long article at times. William Greider is still a top reporter on the state of the economy. THE TROUBLE WITH MONEY is mainly about the American economy. Written in 1989, when the dollar was incredibly strong due to high interest rates, which brought in the flood of foreign investments able to finance growing trade deficits and federal deficits by furnishing an increasingly speculative market for debt, banks were failing at record rates. The price of oil was too low for people with huge mortgages to pay their loans in Texas, while manufacturers paying workers American dollars suffered from a decreasing ability to sell their products in the rest of the world. I'm so stuck in 2003 now, only 14 years later, that complaining about anything in this book is like a drunken bat out for blood that dried up a long time ago. But I'm as upset over the current news about any predictions of improvement in the global economy, a constant hope of those who are looking for the next big spurt of growth that would prevent the kind of collapse that I will attempt to provide in a factual analysis of this book, though at this point, the effort is as much psychiatric anamnesis as the entertainment value of the question in the form of an offer: do you want to bet?

Every percent of something is different from a percent of something else, and this applies mainly to the U.S. Department of Commerce chart on page 70, "Inflation-Adjusted Interest Rates." With a positive 4.42 percent in the 1980s, Greider thinks "the bloated interest rates of the 1980s were rivaled during only one other period in this century--the Roaring Twenties, when similarly distorted social values were in full play." (p. 71). Those who check the numbers at the bottom of the chart will discover a whopping negative 5.13 percent for the 1940s, showing that lenders had little chance of getting their money back at the same value, as time was changing the situation greatly in favor of those who could use money productively. Today's interest rates might seem small to us, "but, historically, 0.35 percent represents a generous rate of real return on short-term T-bills." (p. 70). These numbers were from "Alan Greenspan, the new Federal Reserve chairman, in the fall of 1988 provided the Senate banking committee with some stunning economic figures that, curiously, the press ignored. Greenspan's numbers described the bedrock reality of the 1980s and explained much about the turbulent era--the lopsided prosperity at the top, the periodic financial crises, the erosion of corporate balance sheets, and other unsettling developments . . . plainly about the true cost of money." (p. 69). When the government needed money for World War II, "The Fed, in those years, kept nominal long-term rates at a steady, stable 2 percent, and federal deficits as a percentage of the gross national product then dwarfed the deficits of the Eighties." (p. 71). Constantly comparing things to a drunken bat might not make our situation much clearer, but the federal deficit for the fiscal years ending in 2003 and 2004 might seem large when they are compared to the numbers which this book has preserved.

"The ingenious politicians had found a way to commit upward of $160 billion in public money to rescue the S&Ls--with only marginal impact on the reported federal deficit." (p. 4)

"The New York Fed itself, for instance, served in 1986 as a clearinghouse for a daily flow of financial transactions exceeding $1 trillion . . . Roughly speaking, that meant that each day Wall Street was buying and selling and swapping pieces of financial paper with a presumed value equal to one-third of the U.S. gross national product." (p. 5).

"During 1984, First Boston, one of the world's leading bond houses, itself transacted deals totaling $4.1 trillion--exceeding the nation's GNP. . . . The market in interest-rate swaps, an esoteric investment that hardly existed at the beginning of the decade, then exceeded $150 billion in outstanding volume." (p. 6)

As of 2003, Pentagon plans to operate a financial market in terrorist events, with anonymous traders allowed to bet on when things would happen in the Middle East, as a reliable way for the Pentagon to learn about undercover operations that might or might not be controlled by geopolitical forces capable of operating from within the United States, have been kicked in the shins by a Congress which doubts its ability to provide proper investigations of those instances in the future when the smart money had the unexpected pegged long before intelligence reports made it to the upper levels. The attempt to set up a web page to allow internet activity by the end of 2003 on such bets says as much about the financial activities in which the American dollar is involved (bets could have been for or against, ending the kind of one-sided interest in the economy that this book is about) as the weird kinds of speculation that end up in Chapter 4, "Moral Hazard."