This means that if you were to strategically default on your mortgage after 1/1/2013 and you were underwater $100,000 you’d owe the IRS income tax on that amount. If you do it this year you won’t owe income tax on the debt relief. In an article for the ABC15.com investigative report, Dean Wegner with WJ Bradley [...]

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Federal Reserve Bank of New York  President William Dudley called on the U.S. government to try new programs to evive the housing market while saying the central bank may still consider ways to cut interest rates. “I believe we should also develop a program for earned principal reduction for borrowers who are underwater but keep on [...]

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A segment of Early Show had CBS Moneywatch’ s Jill Schlesinger talking about strategic defaults; if you should do them, when you should do it and what are the costs of doing it. Here is a link to the segment “Strategic Foreclosure” . She talks about using a simple calculation to determine if you should be considering [...]

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For all the folks who falsely believe that housing as we know it would exist without government subsidy really need to look a bit deeper into history. I have to first admit that I felt the same way as I railed against below-market housing production and sales locally. Then I took an introductory course on [...]

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 The median price of a home dropped from $665,000 in November to $632,650 in December. That is down 7.3% from December 2010’s price of $679,000. Inventory, the number of residential properties available on the first of the month, is also down from the previous month and down by 67% over the same month last year. [...]

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Who should an interested party follow when looking at data on home values? Recently there was a flurry of news about the correctness of data and the methodology of the numbers behind them. The National Association of Realtors® was taken to task by CoreLogic®for claiming that sales were increasing when CoreLogic®  was reporting that the [...]

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In today’s report to Congress the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) reported on a number of issues concerning the stability and direction of the secondary market for home mortgages. While there is important information on the compensation of employees at Freddie and Fannie (the enterprises) the information that bears the most inspection [...]

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Here is my dream – earthquake happens – chaos is upon us – leadership is trying to get control of the forces at their commands – meanwhile we, all the citizens living in every neighborhood will be facing possible destruction of property all around us and sad to say maybe death will be before you

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The elected “leaders” of our fair City have placed a choice before us on the November ballot. We are being asked to determine which police process will cut back or better control the deterioration of civility on the public streets and sidewalks, on the surface at least. What we are really being asked is should [...]

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This link is to my monthly column in the local paper. http://www.westsideobserver.com/columns/realEstate.html#mar10 Enjoy. Bookmark on Delicious Digg this post Recommend on Facebook share via Reddit Share with Stumblers Tweet about it Subscribe to the comments on this post

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