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When it comes to buying a house, are you in the “no way I could possibly qualify” category? Not enough cash in the bank for a down payment or closing costs? Credit scores good, but not great? So much deferred student loan debt that you assume any lender would slam the door?

Join the crowd. Large numbers of Americans feel the same, in part because they read and hear that qualifying standards for mortgages are the strictest they’ve been in decades. A study based on a statistical sample of potential homebuyers conducted earlier in the year by the mortgage company loanDepot found that nearly 60 percent of people who say they want to buy a home aren’t pursuing it because they think there’s just no point — they are convinced their applications would be rejected. Three-quarters of them, however, concede that they haven’t done a thing to check out current lender requirements.

But here’s some good news for these folks: Changes are underway in the mortgage market that could give you a better shot at qualifying. Start with recent policy shifts at giant mortgage investors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two dominant funding sources for new loans. Late in November, both companies announced procedural changes that should encourage lenders to be less fearful that the mortgages they approve will be subject to costly “buy back” demands if borrowers go delinquent.

In a buy back, an investor such as Fannie Mae requires the lender who originated the mortgage to repurchase it because of alleged defects in underwriting that ultimately led to the borrower’s non-payments. To avoid buy backs, lenders in recent years not only have ratcheted up their underwriting requirements, but have added extra fees — so-called “overlays” — that are designed to compensate them for losses on loans to borrowers who have below-average credit scores, small down payments and minimal assets in reserve.

read more at: http://www.bostonherald.com/business/real_estate/2014/12/mortgage_lending_restrictions_are_finally_easing

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Advice about saving money on home heating costs abounds this time of year, but some of it is oversimplified, marketing hype or just plain wrong, while some long-standing myths persist.

For example, programmable thermostats are not the holy grail of home heating, cranking up the furnace does nothing to heat a chilly house faster, and fireplaces used as heating sources suck paid-for warm air up the chimney.

Duct tape? Not good for sealing ducts.

To truth-test heating advice, we sought help from Max Sherman, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory overseeing research for residential energy efficiency. Besides being a serious scientist, he gained notoriety in the late 1990s as Dr. Duct Tape for discovering that the gray-backed sticky tape “failed reliably and often catastrophically” when used for sealing ducts. “It will get old and fall off after a year or so of heating cycles,” Sherman said. “Plenty of tapes are good for sealing, but standard duct tape isn’t one of them.”

Here are a few other home-heating myths.

Fireplace fallacy

If you enjoy the sound, smell and ambience of a wood fireplace, go for it. Just don’t think you’re helping your wallet.

“A fireplace is a particularly bad way of heating your home,” Sherman said.

First, there’s paying for firewood. Then you feed the fire’s appetite for oxygen with your paid-for heated indoor air, which it shoots up the chimney.

A possible exception is if you want to turn down the heat in the rest of the house and close off and heat only one room — the one that includes the fireplace. Or, as Sherman notes, it might be a net benefit if the fireplace has sealed glass doors and “you’ve gone through the trouble of essentially turning it into a sealed wood stove … then you no longer have the nice, cheery fire you probably had in mind when you said, ‘Let’s use the fireplace.’ ”

read more: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/dec/06/tp-common-heating-myths-that-can-raise-energy/

disclaimer: for information and entertainment purposes only