The Federal Reserve meets next week for a policy-setting meeting. It's one of 8 scheduled Fed meetings this year in which the Federal Open Market Committee votes on whether to raise, lower, or leave unchanged the Fed Funds Rate. Based on data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Wall Street's expectations of the Fed Funds Rate post-meeting are as follows: 97 percent probability that the Fed Funds Rate holds at 0.000 to 0.250% 3 percent probability that the Fed Funds Rate is raised to 0.750%. There is no expectation for a 0.500% Fed Funds Rate. The ...

For the third week in a row, mortgage markets improved early in the week, only to give back the gains before Friday's close.Mortgage rates ended last week exactly where they started.  However, if you locked your mortgage rate Tuesday, you got a rate decidedly lower than someone who waited until Friday. Last week, one of the biggest mortgage rate drivers was a series of surprisingly strong corporate earning reports, including those from financial firms Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.  The positive reports pushed the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its 6th consecutive weekly gain.  ...

With respect to housing data, news is rarely positive or negative on a universal level. There's always two perspectives to consider, after all. The home buyer's perspective The home seller's perspective Usually, when data is beneficial to one group, it's less beneficial to the other.  This is true for rising home prices, average days on market and so forth. Today, the group that gets the most benefit from data is the home seller group. Published Thursday, a government report showed that Housing Starts fell 11 percent nationwide in March and also fell short of analyst ...

Since 2007, foreclosures have dominated real estate news.  You can't turn on the news or open a paper without some foreclosure-related story.  But for all of the discussion, foreclosures continue to be geographically concentrated.  Adding up the latest stats from RealtyTrac.com, more than half of the country's foreclosure actions from March occurred in just 3 states -- California, Florida and Nevada. Those 3 states represent just 19 percent of the nation's population. Despite the local concentration of foreclosures, however, they remain a national problem.  This is because ...

It's Tax Day today and who among us doesn't love a legitimate tax deduction?The IRS expects to process 138 million tax returns this year and accompanying those returns will be a melange of tax deduction requests.  Most will be run-of-the-mill including such staples as mortgage interest, vehicle mileage, and child care deductions. Others, however, will be less ordinary. On its website, TurboTax pays homage to some of the most off-the-wall, offbeat tax deductions through the years permitted by the IRS.  Among the "weirdest deductions allowed": A bodybuilder's body oil so his ...

Shopping for low mortgage rates is a game of luck. Some days, mortgage rates are favorable.  Other days, they're not.  And while you can sometimes make an educated guess about where rates might be headed, you're not always going to guess right. Even the experts get it wrong more often than they'd like. But some parts of the rate shopping process can be predicted and one of them is the future of mortgage guidelines.  In general, the more often homeowners default on their respective mortgages, the harder it is for future mortgage applicants to be approved. This is why "now" may ...

For the second week in a row, mortgage markets started the week strong and then ended with a fizzle.  In the holiday-shortened week, rates were exactly flat overall.There wasn't much economic data to move rates last week, incidentally. The market's up-and-down action was largely based on two events: A reputable analyst said banking-sector optimism may be premature Wells Fargo reported a record $3 billion in first quarter earnings It was the first item that dropped rates Monday and Tuesday; the second item, in part, led them back up. This week, data returns. Tuesday, we'll ...

When conforming mortgages adjust, they're often tied to an interest rate index called LIBOR. LIBOR is an acronym for London Interbank Offered Rate. But what LIBOR stands for isn't as important as the role it plays. LIBOR is an interest rate at which banks borrow money from each other.  Therefore, when banks feel the banking system as a whole is unsafe, LIBOR rises to compensate.  It's why LIBOR spiked last October after Lehman Brothers failed.  Financial institutions wondered what other institutions would fail and that added risk to the system. Since October, however, and ...