Making Home Affordable Program Doesn’t — At Least Not Yet
Two months after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner began talking about new programs to help holders of federally insured mortgages who have lost all their equity in the housing bust and are now under water, rules for the new programs are finally starting to appear. But like most of the other federal homeowner initiatives described to date, early details suggest the Making Home Affordable Program will be of little practical help to those with low-to-negative equity and less-then-perfect credit scores.
The new programs for mortgage refinancing and modification sound ideal on paper, often requiring no mortgage insurance and allowing loan-to-value ratios as high as 105 percent and requiring no specific credit rating at all as long as homeowners have remained current to date on their mortgage payments. But the devil is in the details and looking into the conforming rate sheets just published by major lenders we see new risk-based pricing adjustments (generally called “loan level pricing adjustments” in the mortgage industry) that can add up to four basis points to the mortgage principal for homeowners with LTV’s above 95 percent and credit scores below 620 – the very heart of the homeowner group in the greatest trouble.
While the government claims the programs can help 7-9 million homeowners, that doesn’t seem likely under the current rules.
On top of other pricing adjustments for property type and loan amount these new programs can add thousands to the loan balances of homeowners with low equity and less-than-perfect credit, with the increased costs often enough to price many homeowners out of the programs entirely.
A homeowner trying to refinance a loan with a 100 percent LTV and poor credit, for example, might easily see the required risk-based points take that loan beyond the 105 percent LTV limit. While it is possible to take the points from savings or investments rather than roll them into the loan, most homeowners in this group don’t have such savings or investments available.
While the new programs are good for homeowners with credit ratings above 680 and LTVs in the 80s or lower, this does not describe most of today’s conforming mortgage holders who truly need a refi or modification.
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