educate2 earn's (educate2earn) Blog

Home remodeling projects are expected to top $130 blllion this quarter, their highest total since Q1 2008. A likely catalyst is that the average cost of a home improvement project is falling fast. With the economy loosening up and contractor costs on a downswing, some in Phoenix homeowners are c...

    Among the most challenging aspects of shopping for a mortgage is how rates change constantly. It’s hard to pin them down. For example, in 2011, mortgage rates have expired every 3-and-a-half hours, on average. That’s fast. There’s two main catalysts for changing mortgage rates. The first can ...

Mortgage markets improved last week overall. Bigger concerns for Eurozone debt combined with lesser concerns for domestic inflation to push U.S. mortgage rates lower. Last week marked the 3rd consecutive week through which conforming mortgage rates dropped, the longest such streak since February....

Earlier today, the Federal Open Market Committee voted to leave the Fed Funds Rate unchanged within its current target range of 0.000-0.250 percent. The vote was 10-0 — the third straight meeting after which the FOMC vote was unanimous. In its press release, the FOMC noted that since its March 2...

  After posting an all-time low in February, New Home Sales rebounded strongly last month. Based on joint research from the Census Bureau and HUD, 300,000 new, single-family homes were sold on a seasonally-adjusted, annualized basis in March. It’s an 11 percent improvement from February, and righ...

  The Federal Open Market Committee starts a two-day meeting today, the third of its 8 scheduled meetings this year. The FOMC is a special, 12-person committee within the Federal Reserve. It’s led by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and the group is responsible for voting on our nation’s monetary policy...

  Home resales rose 4 percent last month, according to the March Existing Home Sales report. A total of 5.1 million homes were sold on an annualized, seasonally-adjusted basis. The strong results re-establish the national, long-term trend toward rising home resales. March marked the 6th month out...

According to the Census Bureau, seasonally-adjusted, single-family Housing Starts rebounded in March, increasing 8 percent over February’s 2-year low. We can’t put too much faith in the data, however, because for the second straight month, the government reports that the data’s margin of error —...

  Mortgage markets improved last week, buoyed by two days of out-sized gains. Mortgage rates bounced off their 8-week highs on much weaker-than-expected inflation data, and debt concerns abroad. It’s an abrupt change in mortgage rate momentum. Since the Federal Reserve’s March 2011 meeting, in wh...

Inflation pressures are mounting in the United States. And, Friday, the Consumer Price Index should prove it. More commonly called “The Cost of Living Index”, CPI measures cost changes in the typical items bought by American households. Among others, CPI measures goods and service in apparel and...