Casey Serin's Blog Closed

Mortgage fraudster Casey Serin has shuttered his blog I am facing foreclosure.

IamFacingForeclosure.com is over. It will never return.

Advertisers: Feel free to cancel your PayPal subscription. I will be issuing pro-rated refunds this week.

Everybody: I'm very sorry to end like this.

Thanks to all the supporterz, haterz and everyone who wrote about me. You guys made the last 9 crazy months of blogging possible.

You may contact me or join my mailing list here.

No doubt Casey's wife finally used that contract when Casey was unable to pull down $1,000/week steady income. I also suspect that someone close to Casey (it certainly wasn't Casey - he was clueless the entire time) realized that the numerous statements of mortgage fraud on the blog were just a lawsuit waiting to happen. Serin was the poster child for liars loans who bought 8 houses in several different states using no doc liars loans. IS the closing of the web site just prelude to avoid Cashcall? Or is it minimizing any potential legal liability? Who knows? More importantly who cares?

Wachovia Buys AG Edwards

In continue consolidation of the mortgage marketplace, Wachovia has bought AG Edwards for 6.8 Billion dollars. See Yahoo article here or CNN's coverage here. It's apparent that Wachovia is making it's play to become one of the big four essentially. It's been picking up regional banks left and right. The shock of the subprime market has left a lot of companies that previously wouldn't have considered a merger, gussing up the place and getting ready to be bought.

Subprime Feature Story

It seems as though the sub prime market in California seems to inspire feature story after feature story about someone who goes from rags to riches and then rags again. Bloomberg has a feature about someone who went from a manager at a warehouse for Target, became a salesperson for Costa Mesa based Secured Funding Corp. I am not sure how many more stories like these I can take. Quite simply the mortgage brokers in California were able to quickly package loans and sell them off to firms on Wall street or large banks

Under U.S. law, investors who buy mortgages or securities backed by them are typically not susceptible to lawsuits alleging fraud on the part of brokers.

I would encourage you to skip the obvious lead-in of the story and read some of the meat of the matter. The body of the article tells yet another sordid tale of the high pressure sub prime sales techniques. It seems nearly inevitable that some sort of new regulations regarding sales tactics, disclosures and appraisals will happen. With the new Democratic Congress these are sure to be more stringent than the previous Republican Congress.

Credit Management - Student Loan Consolidation

One of the most important elements in managing your credit is managing long term debt such as student loans or a second mortgage on your home. In my own case I have to be upfront, I did a very poor job of managing my student loans post graduation. One of the problems was the multiplicity of loans that took in my last two years of college. This meant that I often missed payments and in case of one loan, managed to completely drop the ball on it completely. I would have certainly benefited from student loan consolidation. This would have given me a single payment and single place to right a check. Consolidation would have also lowered my over all interest rate for the loans I had. The interesting thing of course was that this was well before the internet and before federal student loan consolidation was a common practice. Getting student loans consolidated back then was a time consuming process requiring multiple physical forms. Simply put it was really hard to do. This was too bad since this meant that I damaged my credit and made it harder to purchase my first home in California. By
consolidating my student loan debt I could have saved on the interest rate and my downpayment. As it was I bought my first California home with a 20% down payment.

Had I managed my student loan debt better I would have been able to purchase even earlier and would have enjoyed an even greater appreciation in my home's value. So to manage your credit, you should do the following.

• Consolidate your student loan debt into a single payment
  This will make it easy to track and manage your student loans. Having multiple loans with multiple vendors is the surest way to miss a payment.
  
• Set up an auto pay
  By autopaying the minimums+$1 on your student loan, you don't have to worry about the mail time or other inconvienences. By making the minimums+$1 you will show a payment history of paying more than the minimum and this will help with your credit. Additionally it will mean that you don't have to worry about the fiddle faddle associated with the mail.
  

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Subprime Firm In OC beginning to collapse

The Orange Country Registrar has a great story about Quick Loan Funding -- largely famous as being an active player in the California sub-prime market and more importantly the founder Daniel Sadek is famous for having actor Eddie Griffith crash his Ferrari Enzo during a publicity stunt for his failed movie - Redline.

Those willing to wade through the article are more than welcome to read it HERE.
The article highlights one thing - much of the problem in the California sub prime market lies with the incredibly easy way it is to become a mortgage lender in California

Daniel Sadek played Orange County's subprime lending boom like a card shark dealt the ace and jack of spades.

Just five years ago he was selling cars.

Then, in January 2002, he anted up $250 for a state lender license and started selling home loans through his company, Quick Loan Funding.

That right $250 and a $25,000 surety bond and you can be a mortgage lender in California. It's more difficult to become a barber than it is to become a mortgage lender. Today Daniel Sadek has sold his fleet of exotic cars to keep his firm afloat. The staff has shrank from 700 to 125 and his loan volume has dropped to about 60 deals a month. In other words he's done. The firm had to buy back $29 million in mortgages last month (they are writing about $30 mil a month) with numbers like that his firm cannot last. Daniel's desperation was such that he has mortgaged every piece of property to the hilt to keep the firm going. Given the aggressive tactics used by Quick Loan Funding and the number of lawsuits they have currently (the number they will have as a result of the article. Articles like that always increase the number people that come out) - I just don't see this firm making it.

Managing Loans and Secured Loans

One of the principal reasons reasons people get Secured Loans is either debt consolidation or for temporary one time expenses. Most of the time these loans are small and not worth getting a larger homeowner loan. The essential problem that many people don't face when getting a loan is whether or not the loan is going to add to their overall debt load. Many people get a homeowner loan for debt consolidation but continue the overall spending that caused them to get into debt in the first place (for example paying off credit cards and then running them up again). If you are getting a loan for a one time expense such as home improvement, start with the kitchen. Kitchen home improvements yield the greatest return of any single home improvement. Typically you will see a great return on kitchen improvements

1. Plumbing and electrical - 260% Average Return on Investment: Consider repairing or replacing any defective plumbing or electrical items in your home. Make sure you have the right person for the job by getting several estimates.
   
2. Update kitchen and bath - 168% Average Return on Investment: Update kitchen and baths by resurfacing cabinets or painting with neutral color. Replace toilet seats, dated fixtures and drawer/cabinet handles. Freshly caulk and redo grout in countertops, sinks, tubs and showers.
   
3. Paint interior - 148% Average Return on Investment: Repair any damaged interior walls by patching all chips, holes and cracks; then touch up or repaint interior walls with neutral color.
   
4. Paint exterior - 76% Average Return on Investment: Repaint or resurface the outside walls of house, as needed. Patch and repair any damaged areas.
   

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Countrywide Takes advantage of the Subprime Market Consolidation

According to this Washington Post article, Countrywide will be adding 2,000 new positions. In addition they will be adding 50 year mortgages and reverse mortgages to their product mix. The consolidation in the industry continues as many of the sub prime lenders in the marketplace continue to let people go. They expect consolidation so much so that they have launched Country Wide Careers. The recent layoffs in the marketplace mean that Countrywide can cherry pick some of the best professionals in the industry. On that note Accredited Home Lenders Holding Coa San Diego subprime lender, on Friday said it cut 1,300 jobs, or 31 percent of its staff, in the first quarter.

Loose lending standard are a global phenomenon

One of the most interesting things about the current credit markets is how global they truly are. Credit is truly global these days and it's interesting to find that easy credit might have been previously only regional in effect are global. For example in the United Kingdom and Scotland mortgages have been just as easy to get as in the United States. As a result, many people bought more home than they could afford and as a result of rising interest rates are now looking remortgage an existing ARM. Just as here in California secured loans against the homeowners residence are often quite popular as one way to consolidate debt.

In the United Kingdom, credit lending standards are already started to tighten up. Recent moves by the Bank of England have signaled markets to tighten up their lending standards. This is perfectly natural in today's environment. What's interesting of course is how the Feds action here in the States seemed to signal to global credit markets that it was time to tighten lending standards.

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PNC Financial Services Group (NYSE: PNC - News) announced the acquisition of ARCS Commercial Mortgage

The company has 10 U.S. origination offices and has focused on the agency loan market for the past decade. ARCS originated more than $2.1 billion of loans in 2006 and services a portfolio of approximately $13 billion. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

PNC said that ARCS will provide the bank with a complementary customer base and expertise, particularly in financing plans for multifamily dwellings. "Multifamily housing is one of the largest lending sectors in commercial real estate, and agencies are leading providers of permanent financing products for market rate and affordable multifamily projects," said William S. Demchak, PNC vice chairman and head of Corporate & Institutional Banking in a statement.

New Century Financial sells loan portfolio for less than 30 cents on the dollar

New Century Financial sold a 170 million dollar loan portfolio for less than 30 cents on the dollar to Ellington Management Group. Ellington Management is a hedge fund and this will be part of a growing trend of hedge funds, buyout firms and other Wall street firms trying to buy up sub prime assets as the market continues to collapse. New Century Financial will be selling its loan servicing units later this month. Carrington Capital Management, another fund manager, in early April agreed to buy the unit for $133 million unless a rival tops its bid.

Rockstart UP!

Payperpost.com has been running a video blog to chronicle their reality show and startup. The idea is pretty simple. Start a company and then chronicle the changes and challenges that start up faces. In many ways it's pretty compelling. You get to see the inside of a internet funded start up and can be pretty interesting. The current episode is episode number #20 and it's a complete list of outtakes from previous 9 months. It's not two bad as far as outtake reels go (Why didn't the group cake plough make it into the regular series?). Finding your voice in a video blog is just as hard as finding your voice in a regular blog. The current problem with the this episode, is that it's apparent very often people are mugging for the camera to make something interesting. It's far more apparent in an outtake reel where Ted blows multiple set-ups or his "I gotta yell stuff". That stuff is transparently done for the audience and has almost no real appeal to me. In fact the problem with this episode is that it's an outtake reel which means it's a random series of vingettes without a lot of context. Previous episodes have focused on one aspect or another of a startup (explaining your business proposition, sales, getting customers etc) On the other hand, it's apparent that Ted has done quite a bit of traveling (Gotta raise those first round funds) and I found that interesting in terms of getting something like Payperpost off the ground.

New Century Financial to shutdown home lending unit

New Century Financial is shutting down it's home lending unit (which it was shopping around for sale. Surprisingly no one seemed to think that jumping into the sub prime market was a good idea right now). The firings will take place tomorrow. This is on top of the 3,200 already let go. This means that New Century Financial will let go 70% of it's work force.


Related Article at Bloomberg
New Century Shuts Lending Unit as No Buyers Emerge (Update2)

New Mortgage Broker Directory

There is a new mortgage broker directory covering California. California Mortgage Brokers is a service offered by Personalhomeloanmortgages.com. They cover Mortgage Rates nationally and have a full listing of California Mortgage Brokers, available on the web. You can use the city and state navigation links to find your local city/state pages to find a broker in your specific area. They offer a nation wide directory of mortgage brokers and you can easily navigate by city for example (San Jose Mortgage Brokers or Pasadena Mortgage Brokers. After a bit of poking around I found both my first mortgage broker and my second mortgage broker based out of Irvine.



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