Author Archives: Jay Butchko
Is Greater Housing Affordability Coming Soon to Florida?
Housing costs have been astronomical for as long as any of us can remember. Prospective buyers have such low chances of qualifying for home mortgage loans that prospective sellers do not even bother to list their houses for sale. They just wait until a mega millionaire, or worse, an LLC that is less than… Read More »
Can You Get a Mortgage After Filing for Bankruptcy?
Filing for bankruptcy protection does not mean that you will never borrow money again. Yes, it has a negative effect on your credit score, but if a bankruptcy filing amounted to an outright ban on borrowing money or paying in installments, then it would not be meaningful for the same person to file for… Read More »
Don’t Let That Mortgage Refinance Get Away
Some people refinance a mortgage loan because they have recently gotten divorced and the only way to keep the former marital home is to refinance the loan in the name of only one former spouse. When you do this, you want to get the refinance done as quickly as possible, even if it is… Read More »
Coping With Debt When Everything Is Prohibitively Expensive
People who once considered themselves upper middle class, and whom you still consider upper middle class, love to complain about how their money doesn’t go as far as it used to. With their $100,000 annual household income, they are living paycheck to paycheck. Maybe they have even had to cut back on expenses; their… Read More »
Are Zero Down Payment Mortgages Too Good to Be True?
The thought of having enough money to place a down payment on a house when you take out a mortgage loan is daunting, unless you are using the proceeds of a previous home sale to pay for your new property. You may have even heard about the sobering statistic that, if you have never… Read More »
What Can Go Wrong With Applying for a Debt Consolidation Loan?
Your paycheck is barely enough to cover your bills, and as the summer heat turns up, it is only going to get worse. The energy bill is only going to get more expensive as you run the air conditioning almost constantly, and that is a bill that you cannot afford to pay late, since… Read More »
Good News about Affordable Housing in South Florida
When was the last time Floridians heard good news? It will be another six long months before the leaf cookies return to Publix for the holiday season, and if only one hurricane or tropical storm blows its destructive winds across South Florida during that time, it will be a miracle. Florida does not have… Read More »
Enter the Functionally Unemployed
Economists say that the economy is doing great, but they have not walked in our shoes. You need only read a blog post by an economist to know that they inhabit a world that bears no resemblance to ours; it is no wonder that professional economists are among the most likely of all occupations… Read More »
Getting the Most Financial Stability Out of Affordable Housing
It is easy to count the ways that Florida is a dystopia of wealth inequality, and reading the news only makes you feel worse about it, but recently there has been some good news about affordable housing in South Florida. Local authorities have opened up several areas of undeveloped land in southern Miami-Dade County… Read More »
Too Broke to Move?
The summer is usually peak season for moving to a new house or apartment. There is a reason that a popular moving company bills itself as “College Hunks Hauling Junk.” The idea is that, when students have a break between semesters, it is also the time when families move. Moving in the summer makes… Read More »