Should We Tax Our Vets?
The IRS has created an excellent Web page — Tax Information for Members of the U.S. Armed Forces — which explains tax issues for those now on active duty. There are a huge number of rules, most of...
View ArticleThe Real Meaning of July 4th
Each year on Independence Day the U.S. is filled with parades, fireworks and hot dogs. July 4th is a great day to celebrate. The founding of the United States was a tremendous change from the...
View ArticleAmerican Homes Keep Getting Bigger
HUD has come out with a new housing survey and not surprisingly it finds that “U.S. homes today are bigger with more bedrooms and bathrooms than 1973.” HUD’s 2009 American Housing Survey (AHS) also...
View ArticleDid Condominiums Really Start In Rome?
Did Caesar and Nero really rule in a city filled with condominiums? Search through the Internet and the unavoidable answer is largely yes, but in fact there were no condos along the Tiber or near the...
View ArticleA History of the AOL Real Estate Center
How did it all begin? It was back in 1991 that I wrote the cover story for Home Computing magazine. And there, toward the back of the magazine, was an ad for a small Internet provider, what is now...
View ArticleWhy Foreclosure Prevention Is Not Enough
Fannie Mae has opened a new consumer education site which it says “outlines the choices available to homeowners who are struggling with their mortgage payments, and provides guidance on how they can...
View Article9/11 — Nine Years Later
We all remember such days. We remember where we were when we first heard of the deaths of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. We remember when we heard of the Oklahoma City bombing...
View ArticleWhat’s A “Qualified Mortgage” In Real Estate
One of the better ideas to come out of the Wall Street Reform Act was to create something called a “qualified residential mortgage.” You want to know about such financing because most lenders will...
View ArticleForeclosures Up, Mortgage Delinquencies Steady Say Feds
A new report from the federal government tells us that foreclosures rose in the second quarter while delinquencies fell. A review of 34 million mortgages representing 65 percent of all first-lien...
View ArticleFirms Accused of Fleecing VA Mortgage Borrowers
Thirteen lenders — including Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America — allegedly collected illegal fees worth millions of dollars from VA borrowers. In hundreds of thousands of VA refinancing...
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