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Can anyone recommend a mortgage broker?
To make a long story short, our mortgage company has royally messed up our mortgage and the town was threatening to put our house up for sale due to the mortgage company not paying them back taxes (which we wrote them a check to give the town at closing). It's been a battle with lawyers for the past month and I'm really just done. When we got our mortgage it was just through our bank as we were new to Rhode Island and thought it would be the easiest way to go- big mistake that we're paying for now.
With Rhode Island's housing market, I'm not even sure if we'll be able to refinance (we just bought less than 2 years ago) but I'd at least like to be able to talk to someone who could let us know what is out there as possibilities. I know recommendations are usually the way to go but since we don't have any family or friends we can turn to, I'm hoping someone here can help us out!
Thanks so much!
It's a dog's life!
Re: Can anyone recommend a mortgage broker?
We're currently working with Suzanne Caldeira at Shamrock Financial in Rumford. She's on vacation until a week from Monday, I believe.
http://suzanne-caldeira.shamrockfinancial.com/
She's really great about keeping in touch, both by phone and email. We're underwater (or close to it) and she's been working on a Home Affordable Refinance Program refi for us... although because of our super messed up mortgage situation with lender paid mortgage insurance, there's a good chance ours will fall through. And, until we contacted her, we didn't realize we were eligible. Our mortgage was not through Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, but it turned out that our bank had the mortgage backed by Fannie.
(as a full disclosure, Suzanne was great about listening to what we wanted in a loan - term length, monthly payments, etc etc to find out what was most important to us. She did a great job in presenting the options and helping us pick the right loan. But, now that it's gotten complicated with lender paid mortgage insurance, she is unfamiliar with it and we are doing a lot of legwork now to find a way to make it work. If we didn't have this issue because of how badly our current bank screwed us, I think we would have been completely satisfied with her.)
Figure out what you think your loan to value ratio is. 95%-105% and your only option is the HARP program, if your mortgage is backed by Fannie or Freddie. You can check that on their websites:
http://www.fanniemae.com/loanlookup/
http://www.freddiemac.com/mymortgage/
Otherwise, Suzanne gave us options of FHA loans with something like 94% or less, conventional loan with PMI payments of 90% or less, or conventional mortgages with no PMI with 80% or less.
It's a dog's life!
I totally know what you mean by the comps. Our home is nothing like the rest of our neighborhood so guessing our appraisal value is hard. At worst, you'll lose $350 to get an appraisal done.
Good luck! Hope she finds something for you.