Featured Listing: 130 Park Ave., Arlington, MA

Beautifully maintained circa 1890 Victorian. Three floors of living space. In town Arlington Heights location.


For property info, call Bobbi Tornheim 781-861-7300 Click here to view listing.
For financing, call Carol Luddecke 781-472-3917

Why Do I Need Title Insurance When Refinancing a Mortgage?

This is a question I get all the time. It does seem a little crazy to pay hundreds of dollars for lender's title insurance and then have to do it over again a year later when you go to refinance just because of a rate drop. The following is from the website for Chicago Title, one of the top title companies and it answers this precise question. See https://www.ctic.com/4419.asp.

Why Title Insurance Is Needed When Refinancing a Mortgage Loan

Today's lower interest rates have spurred you to refinance your mortgage. Now you can expect to reap the benefits of substantially reduced monthly mortgage payments, but you can also expect to pay the lender the typical closing costs associated with any mortgage loan.
Why? Because from the lender's standpoint, a refinanced loan is no different than any other mortgage loan. So be prepared for service fees or points and other expenses including a new charge for title insurance.

Title Insurance is Important When Refinancing
Why do you need to buy title insurance again even though you purchased a policy when you first bought your home and there is no change in ownership?

It's because a separate policy is needed by the lender insuring the validity of your mortgage when it is made.

For as long as you own the property your mortgage is valid, but it doesn't insure the new mortgage created when you refinance, and it doesn't provide protection against events that may have transpired between the time you purchased the property and when it is refinanced.

For example, you may have taken out a second mortgage on the home that could threaten the priority of the new lender's mortgage. Or, there could be legal judgments against you or a mechanic's lien against the property by a supplier who wasn't paid for home improvements.

Lenders also insist on a new title policy because many mortgages are packaged as securities and sold to investors in the secondary mortgage market. Title insurance is the only practical way to provide the assurance investors demand and to ensure that the mortgages backing these securities are valid and enforceable.

For your refinance transaction with the Chicago Title and Trust Family of Companies, you may qualify for a special title insurance rate based on the loan amount. There may be additional charges for recording fees, closing fees and endorsements. Your lender can provide you with an estimate of these costs.

Copyright © 2003 Chicago Title Insurance Company. All Rights Reserved.

Money Savvy Kids

Sometimes it amazes me how little we teach our kids about money. Even little basic things like how to balance a checkbook and how compounded interest works. These concepts could be at least touched on in elementary school, but often they're not. I met a guy recently who is in his early 40's and only learned about the principle of equity a few years ago. He's kicking himself that he didn't learn about this sooner (and buy a house sooner), especially now that he understands how the factor of TIME plays into it. Sometimes I think about trying to put together a little course on home financing to teach at the high school level ... I feel like it's that important that young people understand the importance of saving and investing starting as early as possible. There goes that *time* thing again.

So I was trying to get in touch with my friend Rod Laurenz from Edward Jones and decided to check their website where I stumbled on a write-up about a woman named Susan Beacham who, with her husband, Michael, founded Money Savvy Generation "to help parents and educators teach basic personal finance skills to school-aged children. Susan's mission is to empower children and young adults to take control over their financial lives and financial futures in a world of increasing financial complexity." COOL. I'm glad to see someone doing this. For all you parents of young children out there, here's more information about Susan's company: www.msgen.com

FHA Loans

Lentegra was recently approved by the Federal Housing Administration to originate FHA-insured Loans. For certain borrowers, such as those who would otherwise be considering a subprime loan, FHA loans offer some advantages, such as:

· May Be Easier to Qualify and Cost Less
· Less than Perfect Credit OK
· Low (3%) Downpayment
· Slower Foreclosure Process

The FHA loan is a stable product with some nice features. However, with all the other financing choices available today, the FHA loan as it currently stands is rarely the best choice and there are some serious disadvantages of the program, including lower loan limits (approximately $50k less than conventional loans for a single family) and the fact that there is any downpayment required at all when other loan programs today allow up to 100% financing.

Another aspect to FHA loans is that they are way more complicated to process than standard FannieMae/FreddieMac loans, with more paperwork and more stringent requirements (e.g., must use an FHA approved appraiser, complete termite inspection required, etc.). They’re a bear.

The Expanding American Homeownership Act of 2006 , a bill currently before Congress intended to make the FHA loan more competitive, has been getting some positive press. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of it.

In the meantime, for those of you for whom an FHA is the right solution, I can do them now!

Happy Birthday, Lentegra

It was a dark and stormy night. No, wait, it was a bright and sunny day ... a small band of brave, merry mortgage people set off to start a new and different kind of company. Thus, began Lentegra Mortgage Group one year ago in June. We've grown from a dozen or so "founding members" to now 45-50 loan officers and staff ... and we're continuously hiring phenomenal people. The best thing is that in such a competitive business we have an extremely collaborative environment. I love it.

We're an employee-owned company based in Waltham, MA, and we are licensed in all of New England and Florida, with plans to become licensed in all 50 states eventually. We have big plans! Most of our big plans are the brainchild of our fearless leader, Bill Lane, an awesome businessperson who is setting the stage for us to turn Lentegra into a powerhouse over the next 10 years. Bill is also the author of our company mantra "Kindness, Respect and Honesty". He really has his head on straight.

Credit Blog

I was about to post a note here having to do with credit scores, but it occurred to me that I'll probably come up with a number of things to say about credit. I just created a separate blog for that. Check it out.

Why I'm Doing This

This is my first blog post. About 8-9 months ago, I started doing an e-newsletter through Constant Contact as a way of staying in touch with my business contacts. I intended to pull one together every couple of months, but I've been pretty lame about keeping up. The one I just wrote yesterday was the first in 4-5 months; it hit me that maybe a "newsletter" isn't the way to go. People expect those to come out at some sort of regular intervals and at this point I can't necessarily do that. Plus sometimes I just have a few thoughts to share, not enough to write a whole newsletter, but then the information seems stale by the time I go to write it down 2 months later. I also believe that many of the people I'm trying to stay in touch with probably aren't really interested in reading a whole newsletter, but they might be interested in occasionally reading a snippet here or there. And, finally, darn it --- every time I've written one of these newsletters I find myself wishing I could just keep a running log of the articles all in one place. Sometimes there's useful information I'd like to go back to. Duh! Light dawns over marble head, as we say here in Boston. What I really need is a blog! So here I am. I am going to look through my past newsletters and see if there's anything worth porting over here, and I'll go forward from there.