Buy A Foreclosure Home

Now that the ink has dried on the Obama Housing Stability Plan, people want to know what’s in it for them. So here goes: basically the Treasury Department will offer inducements and put pressure on lenders to reduce monthly payments for borrowers at risk of losing their houses which should result in five benefits for homeowners. They include:

1. The main benefit is that it provides assistance to homeowners who wish to stay in their homes. The sour economy has made it tough for many homeowners to refinance because for most, their equity has dried up and they are unable to do so. This plan also helps those who may have lost income due to the current recession.

2. No help for flippers. Remember those TV shows where investors boasted of making massive profits by fixing up houses and then reselling them? Those days are mostly gone and in addition, the Obama plan provides no assistance for real estate speculators with homeowners receiving all the funds.

3. The Plan Helps Stabilize Neighborhoods. A foreclosure often brings an unwelcome element into a neighborhood. Most vacant homes attract vandals and vagrants as well as piles of yellowed newspapers on the stoop. Keeping a property from becoming a foreclosure in the first place, the plan helps to stabilize a neighborhood.

4. It Provides Support for Responsible Homeowners: Because loan modifications are more likely to succeed if they are made before a borrower misses a payment, the plan is proactive. It will include households at risk of default despite being current on their mortgage payments.

5. It helps Bring Monthly Payments to Sustainable Levels: The goal of the Homeowner Stability Initiative is to reduce debt for a family to a sustainable (31% of debt to income) level. The Treasury Department will standardize the loan modification guidelines and implement them through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The goal is to create monthly debt payments that will be able to be kept for a long time.

The goal of the Obama program, in a nutshell, is to lend security to the current volatile financial markets. The Treasury must placate nervous lenders who wish to pull the trigger on non-performing assets out of fear that home prices might fall even further if they wait, but stop the market from plunging further so that new purchasers may buy. In other words, lately a purchaser with good credit is finding it difficult to purchase a home because of lender concerns about the depreciating values in the marketplace. The Obama plan addresses both issues in one fell swoop.

Is there more to the Financial Stability Plan? Um, do most foreign films have sub-titles? Yes!. The Plan includes incentives for people who help to successfully modify home loans for owners, principal reduction payments for owners who stay in their homes for five years and even incentives for lenders who postpone foreclosures.

By helping to modify the loans of millions of hard-pressed homeowners and thus lower their monthly payments, the administration may also be jolting the economy at the same time. The word on the street is to look for June 2009 to be the time for that to start to happen. Who knows? Purchasing a real estate bargain now and holding it as a rental property may prove to be a smarter move than parking the money in an IRA or in the wild and crazy stock market!