Some Bank of America mortgage customers will receive an unwelcome Valentine’s Day gift when the bank’s policy for grace period mortgage payments changes on Feb. 14. Essentially, it means those customers will have six fewer days to pay their mortgage each month without facing additional fees.
Consumers who use the bank’s online payment tool, Mortgage Pay, will risk a $6 fee if they fund payments using another bank’s checking account and the payment falls during the final six days of the traditional 15-day grace period. Consumers who make payments from Bank of America accounts are not subject to the fee.
“Let me get this straight. They tell you that you have a grace period, (then) they say, ‘Oops, you only have half of it if you don’t bank with us,’” said Gail Hillebrand, a lawyer for Consumers Union who specializes in banking issues. “That doesn’t seem fair. … This looks like a new ‘gotcha,’ and we have enough of those already.”
Hat tip to SM who sent this along from Marilyn at theocregister.com:
A two-story house on the Seacliff Golf Course in Huntington Beach is the worst example of “malicious vandalism” of a foreclosed home that a top Realtor for bank-owned properties says he’s ever seen in Orange County.
The home, at 6581 Racliffe Circle in the guard-gated The Peninsula at Seacliff community, went back to the bank at $1,782,214 at a foreclosure auction last August after no one bid on it.
The roughly 3,000-square foot house now is undergoing about $250,000 in repairs, says broker Tom Moon of Pacific Moon Real Estate, who has the listing.
Among the destruction: Chemicals and cement were poured down drains, a Jacuzzi was left running for what may have been months, with most walls in the house splattered in mold, and a floor caved in from the weight of a huge pile of wet clothes and other junk.
The day I went by, workers in special bodysuits and masks doing mold remediation would not allow us into the house for safety reasons. As is typical with some foreclosed homes that are found stripped and trashed, the Realtor and the bank cannot prove who did the damage. And with a lack of eyewitness accounts in these cases, police rarely get involved.
Across the street the 4,538sf drug house cancelled their short-sale listing at $1,350,000 (it was hammered), and they aren’t on foreclosureradar either – but it looked vacant.
The only other closing in the last 12 months was the 9,349sf short-sale up the street with -0- days on market that closed for $2,400,000:
Hat tip to daytrip for sending this along, from thelatimes.com:
At Surfers Point in Ventura, California is beginning its retreat from the ocean.
Construction crews are removing a crumbling bike path, ripping out a 120-space parking lot and laying down sand and cobblestones. By pushing the asphalt 65 feet inland, the project is expected to give the wave-ravaged point 50 more years of life.
The effort by the city of Ventura is the most vivid example to date of what may lie ahead in California as coastal communities come to grips with rising sea levels and worsening coastal erosion. As the coastline creeps inland, scouring sand from beaches or eating away at coastal bluffs, landowners will increasingly be forced to decide whether to spend vast sums of money fortifying the shore or give up and step back.
State officials say the $4.5-million project in Ventura is the first of its kind in California and could serve as a model for threatened sites along the coast.
“Managed retreat, as it’s called, is one of the things that we’re going to have in our quiver to deal with sea-level rise and increasing storms,” said Sam Schuchat, executive officer of the California Coastal Conservancy, which helped fund the Surfers Point project.
Sea levels have risen about 8 inches in the last century and are expected to swell at an increasing rate as climate change warms the ocean, experts say. In California, the sea is projected to rise as much as 55 inches by the end of the century and gobble up 41 square miles of coastal land, according to a 2009 state-commissioned report by the Pacific Institute.
For years, the preferred solution to an eroding shoreline has been to build sea walls or dump imported sand to serve as a buffer. About one-third of the Southern California coastline and about 10% of the shore statewide have been fortified with sea walls and other hard structures.
Although artificial barriers may protect property in the short term, they often intensify the effect of waves, leaving beaches stripped of sand until they narrow or disappear, permanently altering surf patterns.
Designed by Omer Arbel, 23.2 is a house for a family built on a large rural acreage outside Vancouver in the West Coast of Canada. There is a gentle slope from east to west and two masses of old growth forest defining two “outdoor rooms” each with a its own distinct ecology and conditions of light; the house is situated at the point of maximum tension in between these two environments, and as such acts at once to define the two as distinct, and also to offer a focused transition between them.
The design of the house itself began with a depository of one hundred year old Douglas Fir beams reclaimed from a series of burned-down warehouses. The beams were of different lengths and cross sectional dimensions, and had astonishing proportions – some as long as 20 meters, some as deep as 90 cm. It was agreed that the beams were sacred artefacts in their current state and that they would not manipulate them or finish them in any way.
Sean, our Los Angeles correspondent, files this report:
Jim,
Up here in LA it looks like BofA/Countrywide just threw the foreclosure machine switch back to the “on” position. The number of Recontrust properties with opening bids set for tomorrow’s trustee sale auctions just spiked, so it looks like whatever self imposed delays or moratoria they had put in place during the past few months just came to an end. Let’s cross our fingers and hope that maybe last year’s misbegotten prediction that they would crank out 65k foreclosures is about to come true a year later.
Remodeling Magazine has published their latest cost comparisons of 35 home-improvement projects, and the additional value created.
The data is broken down into “Midrange” and “Upscale” projects, and has the percentages of how much of your investment you can expect to recoup.
Projects include Home Office Remodel (recoups 54.4% of investment), Major Kitchen Remodel (77.0%), Vinyl Window Replacment (80.3%), Garage Door Replacement (96.4%), and Entry Door Replacement (112.1%).
When is a grace period not really a grace period?
