How Pickleball Saved Me
Pickleball. The fast-growing sport with the silly name. If you’re not already playing, then you’re probably thinking about it, or maybe you have friends telling you how great it is and that you should try it. You’ve probably heard it described as a combination of tennis, ping-pong and badminton. Maybe you’ve caught a match being […]
Black History Month is Something All Americans Should Celebrate
It’s February, the month of the year designated as “Black History Month,” and I feel compelled to say something about it because Black History is American History and we should all care about it as Americans, regardless our skin color. In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford officially recognized February as being Black History Month. Before […]
The HECM Line of Credit: It Should be Called the “Retirement Mortgage”
I need to straighten something out that is both important and widely misunderstood. HECM is the acronym used to describe the federal government’s insured mortgage program for homeowners over age 62… it stands for Home Equity Conversion Mortgage. It’s also described as a “reverse mortgage,” which makes it sound like something that should be avoided […]
Older Homeowners Should Avoid a HELOC
HELOC stands for Home Equity Line of Credit, and it’s the most common way for people to tap the equity in their homes. HELOCs are loans secured by the equity in a home. It’s a loan that requires borrowers to make interest only payments on the money borrowed for the first 10 years. After 10 years, […]
Why Doesn’t Every Homeowner Over Age 62 Do This?
The Home Equity Conversion Mortgage, or HECM for short, comes in various flavors. There’s the reverse mortgage, the HECM for Purchase, which can be used to buy a home while conserving one’s cash, and the HECM Line of Credit. I’ve written about all of these variations, but right now I only want to focus on one […]
COVID-19: How we got here and what we need to do next.
The Covid-19 pandemic has hurt this country in innumerable ways. Beyond making people ill and killing just under a million, it caused incalculable economic harm that we will be living with and recovering from for years to come. It also divided and polarized us even more than we were before, which I’m not sure I […]
The Real Reason Trump Lost in 2020
It’s amazing to me that it has been 18 months since the 2020 presidential election and we’re still talking about it, but we are. There are plenty of people who still do not believe Trump lost the election… some are friends of mine… and having listened to them explain their position, I’ve noticed something about […]
My Father’s Many Gifts, and Mom Let Him Live
My father was a brilliant man in many ways. He was a Harvard grad, Class of ’52… a PhD in water chemistry who went to work at Bell Labs, where he worked to develop batteries that would launch this country’s first communications satellite, Telstar. And for 34 years he was a Professor of Water Chemistry […]
NY AG Warns Mortgage Servicers About Handling ALL Forbearances
Back in July, with millions of mortgage forbearances coming to their ends, FHA published guidelines for how homeowners in a forbearance are to be handled by banks and mortgage servicers in terms of workouts/modifications and the resuming of their monthly mortgage payments. Then on September 27th, FHA updated their guidelines, adding some additional options and […]
Homeowners are Happy About Higher Home Values. So Are Debt Collectors.
According to Core Logic’s Home Price Index, home values in this country have risen faster over the last year than they have in 45 years. Showing that he has no idea what caused the meteoric rise, CoreLogic CEO Frank Martell explained it as follows: “New household formation, investor purchases and pandemic-related factors driving demand for […]
