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Mortgages typically have many different owners over the years and many different servicing bureaus, so it’s not difficult for a mixup to occur over your loan balance. To protect yourself, run an amortization schedule and check the loan balance reported by your lender against it.

Keep a copy of every check you ever write for your loan.

If you call a mortgage servicing bureau about your loan, make sure you get the full name of the person with whom you speak.

If you find yourself in a dispute with a lender about a payment or another issue, don’t send correspondence to the same address you send your payment.

Keep an eye on how much money your bank collects to cover your annual property taxes and insurance. Lenders are allowed to collect your annual escrow needs plus one-sixth of this figure, but many over collect.

One of the smartest things someone can do with a mortgage is to prepay on the loan. All you need to do is contact your lender and ask for its prepayment procedure. Then, once a year, check the loan balance the lender sends you to make sure the additional payments have been applied properly.

Fee-based plans that charge $300 to $500 for administering a prepayment system are a bad idea; you can do it better and cheaper by yourself.

If you reach 20 percent equity in your home, you can save a substantial of money by asking your lender to drop private mortgage insurance.

Avoid paying private mortgage insurance by taking an 80 percent first mortgage and a 10 or 15 percent second mortgage.

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Many homeowners looking to pay off their mortgage early are setting up official bi-monthly payment plans. Why its a bad idea, and what to do instead.

Now may be an excellent time to start checking out your local housing markets thanks to interest rates that continue to hover around their lowest point ever. While Baby Boomers and older members of Gen X may remember taking out a mortgage with a 10% (or higher) interest rate, Millennials.

Homebuyers, you may be losing cash without realizing it. Here are steps people are *not* taking that are costing them a lot of money.

More than 1 in 3 of us are clueless about what our mortgage interest rate is, according to a new BankRate.com survey. Think about it: Your mortgage is the #1 expense in our lives and 33% of us don’t know what interest rate we’re paying! What you don’t know can.

While listening to the Clark Howard Show a few months back, a listener called in to ask if a biweekly mortgage plan (a program where you make half your mortgage payment every two weeks rather than once per month) was a good idea. I was shocked when Clark emphatically told.

Good news for first-time homebuyers or those who don’t own a home today and want to. The strict regulations that forced so many of you out of the market are easing up. Downpayments and credit score requirements are changing It’s been difficult during the last 8 years for first-time homebuyers.

It is a terrible fact of life that getting a mortgage is the biggest pain in the rear just about of any financial thing you will ever have to do. Just when you think you’ve given them every last document, then the lenders come up with something else you need.

For the first time since the real estate bubble, your ability to borrow against the value of your home is returning. This is significant because over the last 8 years, there was almost no home equity line of credit (HELOC) activity and almost no second mortgage activity. But now we.

Retired homeowners strapped for cash are turning to Reverse Mortgages. But there are large fees the celebrity spokepeople aren’t telling you about.