Elemental Wellness Financial Look: Fannie Mae Tests 'Short Sales' as Alternative to Foreclosures

By Nick Timiraos
9 January 2009
The Wall Street Journal


Fannie Mae is testing a new program to stave off foreclosures by preapproving "short sales" of homes, in which mortgage companies allow homeowners to sell houses for less than the value of existing loans, forgiving the difference.

As the number of homeowners in default on their mortgages began to rise several years ago, real-estate agents started touting short sales as a way for troubled borrowers to sell their homes quickly to potential buyers looking for bargains. Real-estate agents reasoned that banks and mortgage companies would go along with short sales, because they tended to lose less money in the transactions than if a home fell into foreclosure.

In reality, most short sales unraveled, because lenders, servicing firms and mortgage guarantors rejected the sales price agreed upon by the buyer and seller, or because it took the mortgage companies too long to approve the transactions and the deals fell through.

"Short sales have received such a bad reputation among real-estate agents that, as a portion of the overall mortgage market, they have gone down," said Tom Popik, a survey director for research firm Campbell Communications. "We hear a lot of people say, 'I'm tired of doing them. They've been a nightmare.'" A survey Campbell conducted in November of real-estate agents found that the average wait time to get an answer from a lender on a short sale stretched to 8.1 weeks, up from 4.5 weeks in a survey conducted earlier in 2008.

Fannie Mae wants to reduce that delay and spur sales by agreeing on a price for a home -- and the loss Fannie is willing to take on the sale -- even before a buyer has been found.

Two pilot projects, in Phoenix and Orlando, Fla., began at the end of December and will last for three months. The test run is limited to properties secured by a Fannie Mae mortgage and serviced by Countrywide Financial Corp., a subsidiary of Bank of America Corp. Only homes already listed at less than the unpaid balance on the mortgage are eligible for the pilot. So far, about 400 homes have qualified for preapproval between the two markets.

While mortgage holders still take a loss with a short sale, they don't have to take possession of the home and find a new buyer. An analysis by Clayton Holdings Inc., which tracks mortgage loans for investors, found that short sales result in average loan losses of about 19%, compared with an average loss of 40% for homes sold after foreclosure.

Fannie Mae officials say that if the pilot program is successful, it may be expanded to other lenders and regions. "Fannie Mae's goal is to make the short-sale process as fast as possible for homeowners in financial distress," in order to ensure a "graceful exit strategy for homeowners," said Kevin Brungardt, Fannie Mae's vice president for servicing management.

Both Phoenix and Orlando have been particularly hard hit by foreclosures. Home prices fell in the Phoenix region 33% last year through October, according to Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home-price index, the worst decline in the country. Some 29% of the state's borrowers had negative equity in August, and an additional 6% of borrowers were approaching negative equity, according to a report by First American CoreLogic, a data provider.

In the nation's hardest-hit housing markets, where many borrowers owe more than their homes are worth, short sales are often the only alternative to sales of foreclosed homes. "Values have come down so far that everybody here's upside-down," said Ron Leis, a Sacramento, Calif., real-estate broker who says about 80% of the properties he sells are bank-owned. "Until we can come up with approved sales, we're stuck selling foreclosures," he said.

But some real-estate agents say that Fannie's effort may be too little, too late, because prices are declining so quickly -- at a rate of almost 3% each month in Phoenix -- that prices may have fallen by the time a home is preapproved for a short sale.

"I don't know how you can determine a price today unless you also have a buyer," said Kevin Kauffman, a Phoenix real-estate agent who specializes in short sales and completed 65 such sales last year. He says a preapproval won't go far "in a market like this, where waiting one month costs you a couple percentage points."

Obama’s Mother-in-Law to Move Into the White House

By Rachel L. Swarns
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com



It’s official: Marian Robinson, the 71-year-old mother-in-law of President-elect Barack Obama, will be moving into the White House, transition officials said on Friday.

In fact, Mrs. Robinson is already in town, helping to smooth the family’s personal transition as Mr. Obama, his wife, Michelle, and their two daughters prepare for new lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“She is here to help them get up and running,’’ said Katie McCormick Lelyveld, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Obama. “She will determine in the coming months whether or not she wants to stay in D.C. permanently.”

In some ways, Mrs. Robinson’s decision to move – at least temporarily — is no real surprise. During the presidential campaign, Mrs. Robinson was a family mainstay, caring for the Obama girls, Sasha and Malia, while their parents were on the road.

She took them to school, to piano lesson and dance lessons, cooked their meals, ran their baths and got them to bed on time. She was a critical part of the family’s effort to keep the girls’ lives as normal as possible in the midst of extraordinary times.

But Mrs. Robinson is also deeply rooted in Chicago. She still lives in the house where Michelle Obama grew up. And she has often expressed ambivalence about the notion of moving to Washington.

“I’ve never lived outside of Chicago, so I don’t know,’’ said Mrs. Robinson, hesitating a bit as she considered last year whether she was willing to move into the White House. “In the end, in the end, I’ll do whatever. I might fuss a little, but I’ll be there.”

Elemental Wellness Technology Stop: The Many Uses Of The Internet Camera

by Katie George

www.cheatgun.com

Internet cameras are fast becoming a staple in homes and offices. This little contraption does more than just broadcast your face to your Internet friends. Learn how to maximize your Internet camera so you get your money’s worth.

An Internet camera isn’t limited to online chats. Sure, they may have been invented for that very purpose, but these days, Internet cameras are used for surveillance purposes. And it fits the bill perfectly. It does all the work of a sophisticated surveillance camera without burning your pockets.

Mom’s Choice?

The Internet camera is fast becoming parents’ choice for keeping an eye on the nanny while they are away at work. Parents can never be too careful with strangers caring for their kids, and it is only fitting, what with all the cases of child abuse. Installing Internet cameras will allow you to monitor the nanny’s activities at any time of the day - as long as you have your laptop with you and, of course, Internet connection.

Aside from monitoring nannies, the Internet camera is also useful for keeping an eye on your kids activities while you’re on a business trip halfway across the world. This way you’ll know if your kids’ are staying up late nights doing his homework, or simply wasting away the nights with movies.

Business Must-Have

If you have your own business, an Internet camera will be a valuable asset. You can set it up in area of your shop or office that offers a good field view, and you won’t have to worry about employees slacking up or sleeping off their responsibilities.

Employees will always put their best foot forward when you’re around, but things change once they think they’re left unsupervised. Internet cameras will help you weed out people you can’t trust and know which ones you can. Whether you keep your surveillance cameras hidden or exposed will be your prerogative.

Allowing your employees to know that they are being supervised will help prevent misdeeds and violations. But if you’ve observed clandestine activities while you’re away and you want evidence against the guilty party, it would be best to keep your surveillance camera as inconspicuous as possible.

Easy Access, Easy Installation

Aside from providing instant access to surveillance videos from anywhere int the world (as long as you’re connected to the world wide web), Internet cameras are easy to install. Setup is easy. When you find the perfect place for the camera, all you have to do is mount it. There are also wireless Internet cameras that make this simple step even simpler. Internet cameras come with surveillance software that you must install in the receiving computer. Installation is also easy - even grandma can handle it. Once online, all you need is your password and your IP address, and you’re on your way to monitoring your kids, nanny, or employees.

Internet cameras have been around for quite some time now, and it only keeps getting better. Technicians are coming up with better looking, better working cameras. And since there are about a hundred or so different products to choose from, you will have to do a little work so you get an Internet camera that will best serve your needs.

What’s Harder, Marriage or Parenting?

January 9, 2009

By Lisa Belkin

What’s more challenging — parenting or marriage?

That’s the question on the table this week over at Momversation.com. The site is filled with videos of conversations among changing combinations of some of the Web’s most trafficked “Mommy bloggers.”

What caught my attention was a question posed by Heather Armstrong, whose Web site is the popular Dooce.com.

“I’ve read some research recently that shows our mothers spent more of their time working on being better wives as opposed to better mothers,” she says. “Whereas, for our generation it seems like it’s kind of the opposite, that we concentrate more on being better mothers than better wives.”

She concludes, ”For me marriage is much easier than parenthood.”

The two other bloggers in the video disagree.

“Motherhood is so easy compared to marriage,” says Rebecca Woolf, of GirlsGoneChild.net and author of “Rockabye: From Wild to Child,” the story of her unexpected pregnancy at 23, and her marriage to the boyfriend she hardly knew. “The first two years of my marriage, both of us were trying to co-exist with each other without killing each other.”

Alice Bradley, from Finslippy.com, agrees: “What does it mean to be a good wife? I don’t know what that means. I know what it means to be a good mother. When you have a baby, its very clear what you have to do — you have to keep the baby alive and love it … It’s hard to neglect a baby, if you’re not crazy and evil. It’s easy to neglect a marriage; you have to work at it and it’s easier to forget that you have to work at it.” (If you find yourself on her site, read her description of giving birth to her son, Henry. One of the funniest birth stories ever…)

You don’t realize you see the world through a fixed lens until someone else sees things differently. For me, being a new spouse was easy, being a new parent was hard. Getting married meant rearranging the metaphorical furniture of my life. Becoming a mother meant knocking down the house and rebuilding it from scratch. Marriage required skill sets I’d had practice using. Parenting required skill sets I wasn’t sure I had.

Armstrong, too, was surprised that everyone didn’t see things they way she had. She’d been so debilitated by postpartum depression when her daughter Leta was born nearly five years ago that she’d needed in-patient psychiatric treatment. (Her book about all that, piercingly titled “It Sucked, and Then I Cried,” will be out in March.) So she’d never really imagined that someone could find marriage the tougher adjustment than parenting.

As she explained on her blog:

It was pretty clear cut for me. I mean, six months into parenthood I checked myself into a mental hospital. That’s a pretty good indication that the software was not compatible with my operating system. Whereas my marriage has caused its fair share of wrinkles, but it hasn’t ever made me consider checking out of life.

Armstong is expecting her second child in June, and says that her feelings about motherhood are worlds removed from where they began:

The instincts I thought would kick in immediately took their damn sweet time and I had no idea what I was doing for about a year. Those instincts finally did settle in, and when I look back at those first few months the memories have the same tone and color as the memory of being dropped into a pool not knowing how to swim.

Which was easier for you, becoming a parent or becoming a partner? (To quote Armstrong, “Since some of us aren’t allowed to marry the ones we love, let’s extend the discussion to relationships in general.”)