Homeowner headlines

U.S homeownership policy only encourages a nation of borrowers, and that’s a bad thing. So argues Mark A. Calabria, writing for the ultra-conservative Cato Institute, in a piece called “The Long Run Decline in Actual Homeownership.”

As it typical with ultra-anything groups, Calabria’s analysis oversimplifies the issue, then argues against that over-simplified version.

Every homeowner (we hope!) knows about the mortgage interest deduction, but there are other tax breaks for owning a home. Can you deduct discount points? Local property taxes? Home-office additions?

“Follow the money” goes the rule — and that in mind, a lot of that money is going into the housing market. By investors, that is.

So explains the CNN article, “Big money betting big on housing“:

Hedge funds and private equity firms have been rushing in to buy up companies and assets in every part of the housing supply chain, including undeveloped land, homebuilders, foreclosed homes, and building parts manufacturers.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has released its new rules governing how mortgage servicers must treat borrowers. They take effect January 2014, and apply to all mortgage servicers with 5,000 or more loans.

The goal of the new regs is to make sure that servicers can’t railroad borrowers who fall behind on their payments. It comes about partly as a result of the “robo-signing” scandal, where those servicers falsified thousands of documents in an effort to foreclose on borrowers.

Certainly you’re much more involved in the buying end of things, but this is the kind of general housing-related information you should be aware of. We’ll keep it short, though.

The new rules, in a nutshell: