Personal Finance Buzz

Buying a home is not something you should embark on alone, and so many of us rely on the advice from those in the business of selling home loans each and every day. It is invaluable to be able to ask your mortgage lender not only about your down payment, but also to seek advice on how to manage interest rate increases.

While we are at a historic low mortgage rate, qualifying for a home mortgage is tougher than it has ever been.

When you buy a home with the help of a mortgage, there is a good chance that you will need to purchase mortgage insurance. Private mortgage insurance (PMI) is designed to protect a lender in case a borrower defaults on their payments. The lender will use a formula to determine how much you will pay. Here's how it is calculated.

The overall rate of U.S. mortgage delinquency – those loans that have fallen 30 days or more behind on payments but have not yet been placed in foreclosure – fell to 7.78 percent during the month of March, according to the latest “first look” statistics from Lender Processing Services, which mined the figures from a database of close to 40 million mortgages. This rate was 11.6 percent lower than the rate from February, and marked a drop of 19.4 percent from March 2010.

When purchasing a home and procuring a loan through any mortgage lender, one of the requirements will be to get home owners insurance.

There are no mortgage companies or banks that I know of who will give someone a loan unless their home is insured. This makes perfect sense as the lender is really the owner of the property until the mortgage is paid off and discharged.