On Friday, my day turned upside down when the weather got really ugly. Here’s a video of the tornado that ripped through the town 10 miles up the road from me - where many of my friends and colleagues live.
Since then, it’s been very interesting following conversations about “safe rooms” … a topic we’ll explore this week on Banks.com.
My home isn’t worth what I owe on it. But I’m not ready to refinance at this point so I’ll keep making my monthly mortgage payments - shuffling around this mortal coil until a door hits me in the backside.
CNN Money is reporting that home prices have dropped 18.2 percent the last quarter, news that could be devastating to a real estate recovery. Why? Because when the amount you owe on the home is far far away from the amount it’s worth, people sometimes think they’re better to just walk away. That will lead to foreclosure, which will lead to a low-ball sale by the mortgage lender, which will drop values in the neighborhood - neighborhoods that are all around us.
It’s important to note that - according to the article - the prices plunging the steepest are also the ones that increased most rapidly during the years before the bubble popped.
“Those markets were driven by subprime lending expansion from the summer of 2003 on,” he [Wellesley Economist Karl Case] said. “After the [Federal Reserve’s lowered interest rates] to fight against the recession of 2001, subprime took off like gangbusters.”
But all is not lost for many homeowners. While these low rates last, it could be a good time to refinance. There *are* loans available contrary to what many would have you believe. One of my readers asked about refinancing when the value of her home had droped about $10,000 from when she purchased it in 2006. Fortunately, she had an FHA loan and is able to refinance through a “streamlined” loan which doesn’t require a new appraisal. Her interest rate is dropping from 6.8 percent to 5 percent - saving her mega bucks each month!
If you want to know more information about whether refinancing is in your future, find a lender and/or a Realtor who have some experience and know what questions and loan products to look for. The money is out there, the interest rates are available, all it takes is a phone call from you to see where you stand.
Photo by Woodley Wonder Works through Flickr Creative Commons.
I’ve always dreamed of having a hidden room after reading The Diary of Anne Frank and The Underground Railroad as a child. My imagination took me to weird places sometimes - I’d scare myself into thinking, “What if a robber broke in? Where would I hide?” and I always ended up in an enchanted attic space through an opening in the top of the linen closet (told you … weird places!)
An Indiana man recently found a *real* hidden room as he was renovating his 1890’s home in Terre Haute.
A friend of Carl Thoms was working recently on plumbing in the 1890 home’s basement when he noticed that he could see around those pipes into a hidden room covered in tiles.
He also spotted a staircase — a discovery that led Thoms to a bedroom off of the home’s kitchen, where he pried up some floorboards and accessed those stairs.
At the bottom of the stairs, Thoms found himself in a walled-off 10-foot-square room covered in tiles that at first made him think the room might have once been a tiled sauna.
Further in the article, the home owner speculates it could’ve been a bootlegging room built during prohibition.
A friend of mine bought a home last year and although she hasn’t found any hidden rooms, it did have some mysterious outbuildings. One was a workshop that took me back to my grandpa’s old machine shop… I just wanted to stand in it all day and live in the past. Another was a run-down greenhouse* about 100 feet back from another mysterious building that took us some time to figure out. Her Daddy said it was a pump house, but I like to think of it now as the house where the ghost of her backyard resides.
Another friend had a her home built. What should have been a door to the upstairs unfinished bonus room was changed in the plans to a bookcase… the bookcase quietly slides open to reveal an amazing storage space (or place to escape).
I want a hidden room.
