South Salem NY Weekly Real Estate Report
Homes for sale 70
Median Ask Price $609,499.00
Low Price $239,000.00
High Price $3,200,000.00
Average Size 2690
Average Price/foot $272.00
Average DOM 188
Average Ask Price $709,403.00
DEAR BENNY: I have about $40,000 left on my 15-year fixed mortgage at 4 percent interest. I owe about $13,000 on a home equity line that is 2.99 percent variable rate. I have a $100,000 equity line open. I have no other debt. I am considering paying off my remaining mortgage with the lower-interest home equity line. Do you think that is a good idea since I am giving up a fixed rate for a variable rate? I would pay both off in about three years. Also, if I close out my mortgage, can I still declare the interest on my taxes from the home equity line? –Wade
DEAR WADE: In general, I am always reluctant to advise readers to switch from a fixed interest rate to a variable one. I am old enough to remember when mortgage interest rates soared to 18 percent.
However, this is a personal decision for everyone, depending on your own financial situation. In Wade’s case, he will be paying off $40,000 at a current low rate, and because he has a home equity loan (called HELOC) of $100,000, if push comes to shove he will still have borrowing capability should he need cash to make the required mortgage payment on the new loan.
Wade, if you have other cash — just in case — then I think it makes sense for you to use your home equity loan to pay off your existing mortgage loan.
Time and time again, the housing recovery has been deemed a reflector of overall U.S. economic health. And right now, both seem to showing fairly modest growth.
In the week ending Feb. 23, seasonally adjusted initial jobless claims dropped to 344,000. This is 22,000 fewer than the previous week’s revised total of 366,000 filings, according to the United States Department of Labor.
However, according to analysts at Econoday, this is nothing to get too excited about, as this drop follows an upwardly revised spike of 24,000 one-week prior.
“What may be signaling improvement are continuing claims which for the Feb. 16 fell a sizable 91,000 to 3.074 million with the four-week average down 36,000 to a recovery low of 3.155 million,” said Econoday.
Also at a recovery low is the unemployment rate for insured workers, which is at 2.4%, a decrease of 0.1 percentage point.
“Initial jobless claims have been more or less stable throughout February and other survey measures of both firing and hiring point to little change,” experts at Capital Economics said.
According to Capital Economics, payroll employment increased by 175,000 filings in February. “Assuming that the household survey shows a similar gain in employment and there are no wild swings in the size of the labor force, this suggests that the unemployment rate remained at 7.9%,” said Capital Economics
All three home price indices maintained by S&P/Case-Shiller finished 2012 with strong gains, but showed signs of losing momentum in the final three months of the year.
Case-Shiller’s National Home Price Index was up 7.3 percent from a year ago in the fourth quarter. The 20-City and 10-City Composite indices saw annual gains in December of 7.3 percent, 6.8 percent and 5.9 percent, respectively.
It was the seventh month in a row that the 20-City Composite posted an annual gain, with every market in the index except New York up for the year.
The National Home Price Index, after strong second and third quarters, slipped 0.3 percent from the third quarter to the fourth on a non seasonally-adjusted basis. When adjusted for seasonal factors, the national composite posted a 2 percent gain from the third quarter to the fourth.
The 20-City and 10-City composites were essentially flat from November to December, each growing by 0.2 percent on a non-seasonally adjusted basis. If adjusted for seasonal factors, those indices were up 0.9 percent from November to December.
David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee S&P Dow Jones Indices, said home prices ended 2012 “with solid gains,” but warned that future growth might not be as dramatic.
Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series.
“According to a recent ‘Nightline’ program, none of the Wall Street executives who engineered the subprime debacle have been convicted on criminal charges. Why do you think that is?”
I think that the most obvious answer is the correct one: The authorities were not able to find sufficient evidence of criminal behavior in any of the cases they investigated (and they investigated many) because there wasn’t any to be found. Imprudent violations of firms’ own internal policies abounded, but such violations are not criminal.
Underlying your question, and implicit in the “Nightline” approach, is an assumption that the subprime debacle was engineered by a profit-hungry group of lenders and investment bankers who, for some unknown reason, decided to run amuck. Given that assumption, the failure to convict anyone must mean either that law enforcement has been co-opted or that all the suspected criminals who were investigated were clever enough to destroy all evidence of their misdeeds.
