Great News! The Military Exchange has expanded to allow more Veterans to take advantage of the benefits. As a Military Home Loan Specialist I help Veterans and their families with the loans for their homes. We help with both refinancing, streamline, and purchase loans. Because of that, I’m always on the lookout for cool new benefits for our amazing Veterans. If you, or a family member, served in the Military you’re probably familiar with something call the Military Exchange (BX / PX AAFES). These are places where you can buy products tax free, and often at a discount. However to take advantage you had to be Active-duty, retired personnel, National Guard members, Medal of Honor recipients, honorably discharged veterans who have been rated as 100 percent disabled, or authorized family members and any military member of foreign nations. Here’s the good news! Starting on Nov 11th 2017 all honorably discharged veterans can now apply to use the Online Military Exchanges. Also cool? They ship for free! Here’s what you need to do – goto VetVerify.org to register and let the savings begin! They’re going to ask you for some personal info in order to verify your service. So if you’re not comfortable with that, you may want to do a little more research on this first. If your records are older, it’s possible the automated registration won’t work. In that case there
Why 2 loans can be better than 1: As housing prices continue to rise, so do loan amounts. You may know that each county has something called a County Loan Limit (You can click here to see them). But did you know once you go over those limits your loan is considered to be Non-Conforming, or “Jumbo”? So what? Well, once you’re in that category many things can change. Here are just a few: Higher Credit requirements Larger down payment requirements Property restricitons Borrower restrictions Higher Rates So you can see that it would be valuable to avoid these issues. Let’s talk about How to Beat the Jumbo Loan. One of the most effective ways to do this is with a 2-loan combo. To do this, we do a first loan up to the highest amount possible, while maintaining the best parameters. That might mean considering things like loan amount, Loan-To-Value ratio, etc. Then we add a 2nd loan that makes up for the difference. For example: Purchase Price = 850k 1st loan of 600k 2nd loan of 165k This gives us the best rates and terms on the first loan, and as a bonus, allows us only 10% down payment! Using this method could save you hundreds of dollars a month, and 10’s of thousands over the life of the loan. So why doesn’t everyone do this? Good questions
Have you been pre-approved but not for enough to buy the home you want? Well, new guidelines recently released mean you may qualify for a bigger loan than before. Of course, this isn’t’ appropriate for everyone. But if you have been in a situation where you were hoping for just a little bit more purchase power, you might be in luck. Recent changes are now letting borrowers qualify for larger loans (relative t their income) than before. They’re doing this by expanding something called the DTI cap. That’s basically the relationship between your income and your debts. Standard expectations were previously set at 45% for conforming loans. But they’re now pushing that upto 50%. For example, depending on your income, that could be an increase of 50k or more! Two things to consider You still need to be comfortable with your payment. So doing the math and affordability calculations with me is critical. Getting a FULL pre-approval (like we do here at the GHG) is vital to making this work. If you’d like to learn more about expanding your purchase power simply click here and shoot me an email. Or you can call me directly for a quick chat. Jeremy Beck 858-863-0262 Co-Founder / Mortgage Planner
Alternatives to HELOCs and Reverse Mortgages. What if I told you that you could borrow money, and not have any payments due for 30yrs? Too good to be true right? Well maybe not! We now have new loan program allows home owners to use the equity in their home, get cash in hand, and not owe any payments. This is not a new program, but it hasn’t been available to most people for a very long time. Basically it works like this – The lender writes you a check based on the equity you have in your home. Then you do not need to pay it back until you want to, or you sell your home. In exchange the lender shares in the increase (or decrease!) in your home value. If your home goes down in value, you could end up owing no more than the cash you were given. If it goes up, you would pay only a portion of that increase, relative to the amount you borrowed. They also take into consideration improvements you make to the property. In other words, if you add a bedroom to your home, that increase in value is excluded from your repayment calculation. In a way, you can think of this as the reverse, of a reverse mortgage. It’s no doubt that you have many questions about this. Just like a
There’s a brand new loan out there that let’s you payoff your student loans without the typical penalties! Well, to explain the benefits of this loan we first need a little background. Normally, when you refinance to take $ out of your home to payoff anything other than your current mortgage it’s called a Cash-Out Refinance. It’s a perfectly acceptable, common, and even strategically sound way to lower your monthly expenses. BUT, a Cash-Out refi can come with some additional costs in your rate, and limit how much you can borrow. Our new loan now allows you payoff Student Loans thru a refinance with NO Cash penalties! This can be a huge savings. For example you could see rates .375 lower (or more!) on this program. On a $450,000 loan a .375% reduction in rate saves $100/mo. If you add in the potential savings of you already get from rolling in your student loans – the monthly reduction in obligations can be huge. Of course, as with any loan, it’s very important to do some strategic comparisons to make sure it’s the right move. Restructuring debt can be a tricky process and you want to work with someone you trust to give you good advice. If you’d like to learn more about this program, or know someone that would, click here to shoot me a quick email – or just
You’ve probably heard that President Trump presently signed an executive order allowing Dodd-Frank to be changed. The promise thus far is that his administration has plans to “cut a lot out of Dodd-Frank”. So at this point you may be asking yourself – ” What the heck is Dodd-Frank?!” Well, essentially Dodd-Frank was a reform act set into place after the big mortgage meltdown. It was designed to place more control on big banks, increase accountability, and increase transparency. On the mortgage side of thing, it can be argued as to whether or not that was accomplished. What is true, is that it created a number of extra waiting period requirements, disclosures, and good deal more paperwork. It also put a lager burden of proof on borrowers when in comes to proving their ability to repay their loan. Ya, but so What? Good question… It’s not clear yet what impact rolling back Dodd-Frank would have the way people get loans. It might make it easier. It might cause another period of turmoil while banks race to learn the new laws. Or, maybe nothing will change at all. One thing I do know is how much I love the way we here at the GreenHouse Group can handle these situations. We’ve been through many of these changes now in the life of our organization. Experience shows that the way we do
The 2016 real estate campaign to buy or sell a home is complete. A GREAT opportunity to take a look back to see what we learned, and what harbingers of truth we can carry forward for the 2017 campaign? We’ll discuss: RENTS looking back then forward RATES looking back then forward Affordability If you are a buyer, now is a very good time to be talking about where you stand now with purchase power as the rates continue to ascend. And, if you are a seller, now is still a great time to see what the last 3 sales on your street looked like to measure backwards on trends so you know what your options are. Hit me up if youre curious about either (or sometimes, both), Jesse@GreenMeansGrow.com 858-863-
Heres a big hug and a thank you to all the families who came out to Kate Sessions Memorial Park this year for our 3rd Annual Pumpkin Patch Party in the Park. We welcomed over 100 families over the course of the day for some games, prizes, contests … 2 bouncies for the kiddos and a killer view only San Diego could offer. We are so grateful to have you as our extended family of clients whom we can look forward to hanging out with each year, like a family reunion ;). Jesse
Jesse’s Secret Stash: Episode 51 | Jeremy Beck On State Of The Real Estate Market We got Jeremy Beck, Co-Owner of The GreenHouse Group and Mortgage Planning Extraordinaire on Jesse’s Secret Stash for your monthly “State Of The Real Estate Market” in San Diego. If you plan to buy or sell a home at some point in your life your going to want to hear what Jeremy & Jesse have to say. These two together make the perfect duo, full of years of experience and they are giving away free information like its candy! You won’t get this information from anyone else so make sure to watch this episode and build your knowledge of the market before you take the big leap of buying or selling your home! In this episode they go into stats for new home buyers and sellers and they also give you multiple reasons why NOW is the best time to either buy or sell a home. The rates have never been lower, and are only going up from here! So listen in for yourself and see why The GreenHouse Group is the place to go when buying or selling your first/next home!
The GreenHouse Group INC is a full service Real Estate & Mortgage Planning Firm located @ 3111 Camino Del Rio North, Suite 400, San Diego, CA 92108. We'd love for you to drop by and say "hello" to us here at our beautiful offices in Mission Valley. Or, if you'd prefer to drop us a line you can call us anytime @ (858) 863-0261. We look forward to meeting you!
