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When does "cleared to close" not mean "cleared to close"? When Fannie Mae's involved! Keep your loan approval intact all the way through funding. Here's how.
The company behind the FICO scoring model published a "What If?" series for common, specific credit missteps. See how your scores can change with a foreclosure, missed payment, maxed credit card, and more.
A mortgage credit inquiry is estimated to lower a credit score by 5 points or fewer. But only if you do it the right way.
The Holiday Shopping Season is upon us and shoppers should think twice about the popular "Open A Charge Card, Save 20%" promotion. The short-term savings may be tempting, but the long-term costs to a budget may be huge.
I did some (more) holiday shopping this weekend and as I stood in the checkout lines, I was repeatedly bombarded by cashiers to open a "free store credit card". "Would you like to save 10% on your purchase today?" "No, thanks," I said over and over, but not because I...
I don't know what was stranger on The Today Show this morning: Meredith Vieira's back-to-back interviews with Jim Kramer and J.K. Rowling Jim Kramer looking like a fish out of water in front of a camera Watching Lester Holt and Matt Lauer (1) share the anchor desk and, (2) actually...
From the CBS News Video Web site, an interesting story for anyone who's recently applied for mortgage credit. The three major credit bureaus -- Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion -- sell the contact information of new mortgage loan applicants to other mortgage lenders that want to compete for the same business....
In his weekly syndicated column, Kenneth Harney pulled back the curtain on a nasty piece of IRS tax code that can penalize homeowners with foreclosures and short sales. For those that don't know, a short sale is when a lender accepts a payoff amount that is less than the amount...
The much-hyped VantageScore credit scoring system seems to be getting a lot of press lately, so thank you to Holden Lewis at Bankrate.com for keeping it real. According to the VantageScore Web site, it is the "new standard in credit risk scoring". "Why did we create VantageScore? Simply put, the...
The Orlando Sentinel picked up a terrific BankRate.com story this weekend about failed marriages and the mortgages left behind. "Divorce is one of the leading causes of foreclosure today," says William Martin, a lawyer in Lowell, Mass., who specializes in real estate. "The other major cause is a catastrophic health...
A credit score is a prediction the future. Specifically, credit scores predict the likelihood that a person will not make a mortgage payment in the next 90 days. The best way to predict a person's behavior over the near-term future, history has shown, is to look at that person's behavior...
