Mortgage Update

Measuring Tape Pendant Light

Make this bright pendant lighting project from strips of measuring tape.

Step 1: Create the pendant light top by cutting a “Beware of Dog” sign in half with tin snips. Adhere the printed sides together with construction adhesive or super glue. Let dry. 

Step 2: Use a compass to draw a 5-1/2-in circle on the sign. Starting at the same center point, draw a 5-in circle within the larger circle.

Step 3: Mark 16 equidistant points around the 5-in circle. 

Step 4: Place scrap wood under the circles and drill a 1-in hole in the center.

Step 5: Drill a 1/8-in hole at each of the 16 equidistant points.

Step 6: Cut out the 5-1/2-in circle by first cutting out a slightly larger circle (about 6-in) and then working in to ensure a precise cut.

Step 7: Attach the circle to the pendant light fixture by unscrewing the ring from the threaded bulb socket, sliding the circle on, and then screwing the ring back on to secure it in place.

Step 8: Cut the measuring tape into 16 strips that are each 14-in long. Drill a 1/8-in hole 3/16-in from the end of each strip, and then hang them with S-hooks.

The Foreclosure Report - September 2012

Dramatic Declines in Foreclosure Activity

September 2012 California Notice of Defaults were down 20.7 percent from the prior month, and down 48.1 percent compared to last year. There has been speculation that the banks would rush to clear inventory before the CA Homeowner Bill of Rights takes affect in January 2013, causing an increase in the number of foreclosures. Clearly this is not the case as we continue to see the number of Foreclosure Starts decline. Notice of Trustee Sales remains basically flat, up 1.9 percent from the prior month.
September 2012 California Foreclosure Sales are down 17.9 percent from the prior month, and down 30.4 percent compared to last year. However, a larger portion of Trustee Sales, 39.2 percent, are being purchased by investors compared to 27.2 percent last year.
In the other states in our coverage area, Foreclosure Starts are down with Arizona down 37.1 percent, Nevada down 40.1 percent, Oregon down 40.0 percent, and Washington down 31.2 percent from the prior month. Sales are also down with Arizona down 24.3 percent, Nevada down 19.5 percent, Oregon down 0.3 percent, and Washington down 33.5 percent from the prior month.
"It was recently reported that the nation's five largest mortgage servicers have implemented all of the 320 servicing standards required under the national mortgage settlement,” stated Sean O'Toole, Founder & CEO of ForeclosureRadar. “The continued decline in Foreclosure Starts clearly shows that even though servicers are now apparently in compliance and clear to move forward with foreclosures, they are still in no rush to foreclose on the majority of delinquent borrowers.”"

CALIFORNIA'S FORECLOSURE MARKET

View all California statistics by county, city or ZIP »

Industrial Side Tables

Build these attractive industrial side tables for a modern look at an affordable price.

Instructions

• 1. Trim four 15" legs and eight 18" rails from the L angles. Use painter’s tape to mark where you will cut. If cutting brackets with a hacksaw, clamp them to a table to secure while cutting. After cutting, file the ends smooth.

• 2. Connect one 15" leg to two 18" rails with bolts, lock washers, and nuts, creating one table corner. Do not tighten nuts securely until all pieces are assembled. Continue connecting the legs and rails to create a cube.

• 3. Cut an 18½"×18½" piece of plywood. Sand and finish with polycrylic, polyurethane, or paint. Place face down, then flip metal cube onto top of plywood and attach it to the cube with a screw through one of the bracket holes. Repeat on all four sides.

4 tips for a smarter home purchase

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson
Inman News®

 

The fields of behavioral economics and behavioral finance are a couple of 21st-century mashups, academia-style, blending observations about the often-irrational financial decisions people make (which, writ large, become economic trends) with insights from the behavioral sciences, from anthropology to psychology, and beyond.

Though these disciplines originated in the ivory tower, they have, in turn, given birth to a number of findings, insights and even mandates for every homebuyer who wants to optimize the dozens, maybe even hundreds, of decisions they'll face at every point on the path to purchasing a home, from when to buy to how much to offer to what type of mortgage to take.

Here are the four most powerful behavioral econ and finance insights with real estate implications, and how you can apply them to level up your own homebuying decision-making:

1. Observing willpower basics can help you avoid overspending. In real estate, overspending can mean any of several things, but there is one definition that is particularly insidious, and it's the simplest: spending more than you can truly, sustainably afford to!

This happens because, over the years, buyers have grown to conflate their lender's decision on how much they can spend with their own decision to make about how much they can afford to spend.

It's like confusing your credit card limit with what is responsible to spend.

Willpower researchers have found that not only does the elusive ability to exercise self-control in the face of temptation actually exist, it can be fostered in some relatively simple ways. This is good news for homebuyers in today's hot market, where multiple offers and a fear of missing out on good deals can create that auction atmosphere that causes otherwise sane and sober spenders to throw every cent they can at their target home.

The theory of ego depletion says that willpower is finite, and can be depleted by putting too many demands on it at once. So, rather than trying to diet, stop biting your nails and start a new cardio regimen all at the same time, most people do better making one willpower-sapping change at a time.

And the same goes with homebuying: If you've had a day where you went to great lengths to bite your tongue to avoid snapping at your kids, and you also had to turn down Girl Scout cookies and birthday cake carbs at work all day, it might not be the right night to decide how much to offer on your home. Instead, ask your agent to connect with the listing agent and let them know to expect an offer in the morning.

Similarly, avoid letting yourself get too hungry or binging on sugary treats during the stress of your house hunt; willpower requires brain glucose, so super-hungry house hunters or those on a sugar rush/crash cycle are liable to make poor decisions at offer-price decision time.

2. Ditch the herd. Everyone wants to buy low and sell high, especially when buying a home. The challenge is that we all have an innate fear of missing out on both bargains and profits. Our inclination to act on this fear is exacerbated when we hear stories of the steal that our cousin got on a foreclosed home at the bottom of the market, or the cash that is being thrown at our next-door neighbor at the top.

Think about it: When prices are cheapest, and on the decline, demand is low and is hard to drive upwards, because people are afraid to buy a home when they think the price might continue to decline. And the opposite is true: When home prices are rapidly ascending, demand is high, and tends to snowball even higher, as people afraid of missing out on value increases and others afraid of being priced out of the market frantically join the herd and buy, buy, buy!

This is precisely why it's foolhardy as a homebuyer to try to time the market just right. Best practice is to buy when the time is right for you, your family and your finances, then to get educated about market dynamics and use them to inform your strategy on how you execute your purchase, like what price range and area to target, how much to offer and when to lock your interest rate.

3. Overconfidence and real estate are a deadly combination. Behavioral finance researchers and theorists have devoted a lot of attention to overconfidence: the tendency of some investors and financial professionals to overestimate their ability to pick stocks, trade profitably or otherwise succeed at a given task. In the realm of traded assets, overconfidence cause all sorts of simple, yet potentially catastrophic, behaviors, like making excessive trades, which has been correlated to big time losses over time.

And overconfidence is just as deadly in real estate: Homebuyers who incorrectly gauge their own bargaining power, future finances or fix-it prowess can and often do end up in what my mom would call "a world of hurt."

• Lowball offers or other negotiating strategery (no typo) can result in lost home after home, all while prices go up and your energy and enthusiasm go down.
• Making mortgage obligations with overly optimistic hopes for your future income or the home's appreciation is exactly what got the last generation of homeowners in trouble.
• And buying a major fixer when you have no money to hire a contractor and you've never even had any interest in owning, much less swinging, a hammer? It's a recipe for disaster. Didn't you ever see "The Money Pit"?

4. Don't let loss aversion make you forget what you can truly afford. There is an interesting imbalance in most of our brains, when it comes to our financial decisions: We are more afraid of losing money (and financial opportunities) than we are attached to acquiring gains. That is, our fear of loss is much, much greater than our emotional attachment to potential profits.

In homebuying, this most often manifests when house hunters lose their minds and cut the purse strings entirely to secure a hot home in a hot market. This is the same mindset that has kept homeowners stuck in homes in depressed markets: Some unemployed and underemployed homeowners have even forgone great job offers in other areas, committed to spending what might be dozens of years in the very worst local economic markets, all to avoid short-selling the place and taking a loss.

I've seen people do very, very scary things out of loss aversion, from simply (but devastatingly) overextending themselves to buy homes they can't afford without endangering their financial well-being, to taking mortgages they knew would adjust problematically in 12 months. What's even more dysfunctional, though, is avoiding the "loss" of a target property by taking gifts and loans from relatives who you know upfront will be less than cheerful givers and who you know upfront will never let you hear the end of it.

Industrial Style Flex Lamp

Add a twist to your room’s lighting with this easy-to-make table lamp.

Cast a cool glow with this high-style, low-cost lamp. Grab a utility knife and follow these easy steps to create your own flex lamp.

Instructions

• Step 1: Cut the square ends off the Flex-A-Spout.
• Step 2: Fold the rope light in half and push it through the Flex-A-Spout. Be sure to leave the electrical plug hanging out of one end.
• Step 3: Twist the Flex-a-Spout into the desired shape.
• Step 4: Plug in the rope light, and you’re ready to glow.

How to spot opportunities created by new technology

Understanding the relationship between hardware, software and technology

By Gahlord Dewald

 

We deal with an amazing variety of different digital devices every day. We have computers, laptops, cellphones, tablets and readers -- not to mention stuff we can't see or hold that resides inside of TVs, cars and who knows where else.

There are bits of software residing in all of these things. For people who don't rely on technology to make their business run better, there's no real need to think about all of this digital stuff at all. They can simply turn it on and it works -- it may as well be magic. Purchase decisions are based on cost, basic functionality, and sending the right social signals about the user's status and beliefs.

For those of us who use digital stuff to make our business run better, it's worth understanding how the ecosystem of digital stuff operates. Knowing how "digitalness" is expressed through tangible objects, intangible software and overarching technology themes gives us an advantage.

Understanding the relationships between digital stuff allows us to observe the tools of our craft more clearly. It's like knowing -- and appreciating -- the difference between a socket wrench set and an adjustable crescent wrench.

We can make deeper, more effective use of digital stuff if we evaluate how useful it might be in context, comparing apples to apples. The decisions we make can be driven by more than social signals (or consciously driven by social signals).

As a first step, let's put some categories around the different kinds of digital stuff out there and see how they relate. Let's get really geeky and call it a taxonomy of digital stuff.

Hardware -- the tangible digital stuff

Even though digital stuff is almost entirely focused on the shifting and sifting of ideas, there still needs to be a way for people existing in the real world to interact with those ideas. This happens through hardware.

Anything that your eyes see, or your hands hold, is a piece of hardware. Hardware allows us to accomplish several tasks:

• input ideas
• manipulate ideas
• output ideas
• store ideas
• share or transfer ideas

Some pieces of hardware do all of these things -- a laptop computer that has an Ethernet connection, for example. Some pieces of hardware are very specialized and do only one of these things -- an external hard drive, for example.

Even though the five tasks of hardware listed above might seem simple, we know from experience that they aren't. Not every piece of hardware that can do all five things is enjoyable or effective to use. This has to do with how the hardware relates to the other two categories of digital stuff.

Software -- the intangible stuff

Software is simply the lines of code that give instructions to pieces of hardware to facilitate input, manipulation, output, storage or transfer. Most of us have used software that's designed primarily for manipulation. We like a spreadsheet to manipulate numbers. We like a word processor to manipulate words.

With the rise of the Web we became very interested in software that deals with output, storage and transfer. We began to like software that would output our ideas into a website -- Web publishing software.

Then we began to like software that not only output our ideas, but also handled a variety of specialized storage tasks -- content management software. As social media began to rise, we became interested in software that could spread our ideas through the different social networks -- social sharing plug-ins for our content management software.

The kinds of software that interests us depends on the tasks we're trying to accomplish. Software, however, will be driven as much by relationships to the other two categories of digital stuff as by our specific needs and desires.

Technology -- the really intangible stuff

Technology is a broad, overarching category for digital stuff. There are, of course, technologies that are completely unrelated to digital stuff. But in this column I'm focusing on the digital technology.

Technology contains the theories, laws of physics and hard sciences that simultaneously constrain the other two categories of digital stuff and allow them to bloom. At their core, technologies are simply ideas about what is possible within the five tasks and how the five tasks can be accomplished.

For example, we can share ideas through a multitude of digital technologies:

• digital printing.
• email.
• file transfer over an Ethernet network.
• file transfer over the Web.
• asynchronous messaging.
• real-time communication.

Which specific technology will be appropriate for us depends upon what we are hoping to accomplish, and is constrained or enhanced by our choice of software and hardware.

Software and hardware typically follow the lead of technology. New capabilities are developed as a somewhat amorphous technology first and then deployed specifically in hardware or software applications.

For example, near field communication (NFC) is a technology that allows for sharing of ideas at short distance. NFC gets deployed in cellphone hardware. NFC also gets deployed as software for choosing which sorts of ideas to send or receive. If the idea being sent or received is something like a credit card number, then additional security technologies get blended in.

The technology -- in this case, near field communication -- isn't the hardware (the cellphone), nor is it the software (which lets you decide what is being shared). The technology is something different, allowing hardware and software to exist, and extending your ability to share ideas.

Technology will often be informed by developments in hardware or software, however. For example, when digital devices were the size of a room, there wasn't much need or consideration for a near field sharing technology. But once equivalently powerful devices could fit in a pocket, the idea of wirelessly sharing ideas became interesting.

Technology also plays with the relative importance of the five different tasks. It can even add new tasks, though that happens very rarely. Different technologies mix, match and mash up the tasks in ways that are feasible to bake into software or hardware.

Of course, people influence technology as well. Right now, there's a lot of interest in sharing ideas, so many technologies about sharing are being developed. At other times, there was a similar focus on technologies for manipulating ideas.

Using the three categories of digital stuff

By understanding the three categories of digital stuff -- hardware, software and technology -- you can make better decisions. You can make better decisions about what to use right now to solve a problem. You can make better decisions about what to look for in the future to solve a problem.

You can also, if you get really interested in watching these things, see how and where the future might develop. By watching where the deeper technologies are moving, shifting and developing, you can identify opportunities that will be available in the future as they filter down into hardware and software.

But in any event, remember simply that digital stuff is about shoveling ideas around. In order to do that you need some object to interact with, some code to handle the idea in the digital realm, and some technology to enable the thing to work.