Refinancing Upside Down Mortgage – CA – Real Estate Taxes, Short Sales, Mortgage Refinancing in CA

Refinancing your Upside Down Mortgage isn’t easy.

There are so many rule and tricks that you need to follow that most people get overwhelmed with all the data and information they obtain that they can even focus on what they really need to be doing.  Not to mention all the bad information that flies around and just flat out confuses people.  The most important thing is that every individual person is different and one experience may be similar to another but they are NEVER the same.

I haven’t posted anything in a while so I am going to take some time and go over everything that I have been up to so everyone gets their moment and I get as much “Good” information to you as possible.  I have been up to quite a bit in these past few months so I will share with you everything I can.

1. Upside Down Mortgage Help – There is a Local Sacramento Attorney who sat down with me and we developed a program to help homeowners understand their situation by offering Upside Down Mortgage Help! – There are a couple videos there that will go into detail how to handle your use FNMA’s new Upside Down mortgage refinance program DU Plus.  This program allows those who have two mortgages to refinance the first mortgage as long as that loan is a FNMA mortgage.  The details to that program can be found at http://www.brentlane.net – QUICK NOTE: to get to all the videos please insert your email and select “No Thanks, take me to the videos” on the second video page.  This will quickly give you direction and tell you which option is most suitable for you and your family.

2. FHA Streamline Refinance in CA – Have you checked your mailbox lately?  By now you should have heard about this Streamline FHA Refinance CA but if not this mortgage refinance can save you a couple hundred dollars a month.  There are several people who for whatever reason haven’t see the true value of this streamline FHA refinance because $100-$150 a month just isn’t worth it to them but the reality is that if you plan on staying in your home for more than 4-5 years this is an easy way to lower your payment.  This loan is a savior to many.  It is free from income and appraised value checks so if you lost your job or know that your houses value is down it doesn’t matter here.  The only rule is that you have a FHA currently to qualify.

3. Real Estate Taxes on Mortgage Refinances CA – I am not a expert on anything tax related but I wanted to share with you a couple common pitfalls regarding taxes and escrow or impound accounts.  In almost every Mortgage Refinance CA transaction I have had this year I have had an issue with escrow or impounds and the related tax bills.  Funny part, every one of my clients had been underpaying their monthly taxes!  When we go through the refinance process we verify that the taxes are accurate and that they are paid and that the escrow/impound numbers are accurate.  Now most people would know that house values in CA have been on the decline for the past few years.  Since the clients took their purchase Mortgage on the property their taxes have been reflecting poorly.

Traditionally when you buy a house the new tax bill is close to the old value on the property but as a rule of thumb property taxes are are 1.10%-1.25% or the properties purchase price.  Now if that purchase price is considerably less then the current value the tax collector has placed on the property then the amount that needs to be paid to the tax collector is going to be substantially less as a result.  In other words, my clients weren’t paying enough to their impound or escrow accounts and therefore when we went to do the streamline FHA Refinance CA we would have a shortage in the escrow account and that had to be built into the new loan or made part of the total payoff of the current mortgage.  To make matters worse,  the tax bill increased from the current number sometimes wiping out the entire savings the FHA Streamline Refinance CA provided.

Needless to say this made it difficult for most of my clients to understand and left quite a bit up to the tax collector moving forward.  The easiest explanation for this situation was that if we did nothing the current escrow payment will go up forcing you to catch up and then add back in a higher payment until the property taxes are correctly reporting potentially raising the payment by a couple hundred dollars.  Now in the streamline FHA refinance CA process there is no savings reflected in the monthly payment so a lengthy explanation was always needed to get the transaction closed but in the end everyone of the people I assisted in this process was happy except one! ( I am not perfect )

4. On The Money Radio Show – Recently I was offered an opportunity to work on the radio talking about one of my passion projects, Mentoring Youth through Coaching Football, Character Based Coaching.  The Playmakers Radio Show was born and together with my radio co-host, Greg Roeszler, I made my radio debut.  The show is on 950AM KAHI or http://www.kahi.com and airs on Sunday’s around the Raiders Games.  We discuss youth and prep sports in the local and national area.

That all led to being on a different program related to my actual day job and On The Money Mortgage Show was born.  My co-host for this show is Shellie Hatfield and we have been discussing some great mortgage news and recent updates.  This show also airs on Sundays at 9am on 950AM or http://www.kahi.com.  Shellie has really done her homework and introduced me to all sorts of other mortgage related issues.

We have discussed HVCC and AMC which are appraisal related issues and how they are negatively impacting the real estate market by making things more expensive.  Shellie introduced a great example on how an AMC (Appraisal Management Company) cost her client $900 in appraisal fees versus the traditional $450 (up from $350 thanks to the AMC’s).  AMC’s use appraisers that are NOT familiar with the areas where appraisals need to be ordered and this causes many problems for those people in the real estate transaction.  We are working hard to remove AMC’s as a policy as it hurts the consumer while making some agency or government monitored company wealthy.

You can listen into the On The Money Radio Show 950AM show below!

5. Local Affiliate Marketing - Since writing online for several years now I have learned quite a bit.  During that time I have been lucky enough to have the search engines deem my websites worthy of being on the first page of their results.  As a result I have been averaging quite a bit of web traffic to my site and have been able to send traffic to other sources as a result.  This has raised some eyebrows as you can imagine and as a result I have been asked several times to assist others in duplicating the process for their businesses.  As a result I have taken a couple people and walked them through how I managed to put rank my website so high in search engines.

This has spawned a new business for me and I have been able to help several other people and businesses with their online marketing and introduced the concept of Local Affiliate Marketing.  Check out the site for details on how I can help you and your website or online business or contact me directly.

6. Playmakers Organization and High School Football – Now if that wasn’t enough I donate quite a bit of my time to a non-profit organization called Playmakers.  The organization takes care of homeless kids and mentors youth using coaching as a tool.  Playmakers also offers free youth and high school football camps in Sacramento.  In 2009 we coached around 700 kids between all the different football camps we did all across the country.  I am proud to be a part of the organization as it grows into something even greater.  Here is a little bit about this program:

That should about do it for this giant post but if you need anything please feel free to contact me, I am sure you can find my email on here somewhere!

Brent [at] brentlane.net

Short Sale Help – A Case Study by Real Estate Attorney Steve Beede