Following IndyMac’s announcement that they’re exiting retail and wholesale lending, Illinois-based Prospect Mortgage announced the purchase of IndyMac’s retail lending network for an undisclosed amount. Prospect owns Metrocities Mortgage, a nationwide mortgage bank who claims 5.6 billion in fundings for 2006 (irrelevant number in current market context); Opteum Mortgage, a mortgage broker headquartered in New
Indymac
Some experts believe that, as a typical consumer, my financial well-being can be measured by 5 basic indicators: job creation, changes in real wages, changes in home prices, changes in equity prices, and access to credit. Let’s see… mortgage bankers (and others in many other industries) are seeing “negative” job creation, my real wages are
TREASURIES UP AS FANNIE/FREDDIE FREEFALL Yesterday shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both plummeted after an analyst with Lehman Brothers wrote in a report that the two companies may need to raise billions of dollars if accounting rules (FAS 140) are changed. Most experts feel that they will not have to come up with
In an announcement today, IndyMac said they are closing their retail and wholesale lending units, and plan to lay off about 3800 employees in coming months to reduce expenses by about 60%. They will keep their reverse mortgage unit and their loan servicing/retention businesses which, combined, will generate about $5b to $10b in new loans
Waiting for that big inheritance? Don’t hold your breath. According to figures compiled by the Tiburon Strategic Advisors and the Wall Street Journal, and published in their Saturday June 14th edition, 25% of workers believe that they will need less than $250,000 for retirement (although 23% have a goal of having $500-$999k). The median value
I made a mistake today. The “recency effect” says that a person best remembers items from last on a list. One offshoot is that people also tends to remember the last song that they heard on the radio before turning it off, and has that song running through their head all day. For me this
Whether you think “May Day” signifies International Worker Day, or a cry for help, a celebration of spring, or a day of political unrest, here we are. Four months of 2008 already gone, and what have mortgage rates done since the beginning of January. 30-yr conforming began the year at 6.125%, and yesterday they were
I was reading the fine print in my retirement benefits plan the other day, and ran across this: If you had purchased $1,000.00 of Delta Air Lines stock one year ago you would have $49.00 left. With Enron, you would have had $16.50 left of the original $1,000.00. With WorldCom, you would have had less
My parents bought their house in 1967, paid off their loan in 1997, and have no interest in this “reverse mortgage stuff.” It is often surprising how many own their homes outright. But last week the Federal Reserve (in their US Flow of Funds Accounts report) announced that Americans’ percentage of equity in their homes
In conjunction with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, six major lenders announced a plan to stop foreclosures on defaulting borrowers to give them a chance to keep their homes. This is a good sign that banks are willing to help ease the housing market pain, and also a tacit admission of the perils of loose underwriting