Home for the holidays. The very image can cause us to develop excruciating holiday back spasms, sometimes as early as September—because the cliché of familial holiday bliss has an evil twin: that of the dysfunctional family at its worst. For the legion of CDFs (Children of Dysfunctional Families), don’t assume that you can’t enjoy family gatherings. With the right mental set, you can have a good, relaxing time at whatever festivities you attend, no matter how wacko your kinfolk may be.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Foreclosure filings fell by 8% in November, making it the fourth consecutive month of improvement in the housing market.
There were 306,627 filings last month, according to RealtyTrac, an online marketer of foreclosed properties. That decline follows a 3% drop in October, 4% in September and 1% in August.
“Loan modifications and other foreclosure prevention efforts, along with the recently extended and expanded homebuyer tax credit, are keeping a lid on the most visible symptoms of the nation’s ailing housing market — foreclosures and home value depreciation,” RealtyTrac CEO James Saccacio said in a prepared statement.
However, while there are signs of improvement, the industry has yet to turn around: Foreclosure filings were still a lofty 18% above November 2008’s levels.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney..com) — The Great Recession has ravaged savings and boosted unemployment rates, forcing people become more conservative with their cash. It has also made homes a lot more affordable — at least for those people still working.
The typical American family, making the nation’s median income of $64,000 a year, could afford to buy 70.1% of all homes sold in the United States during the third quarter, according a quarterly report from the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and Wells Fargo (WFC, Fortune 500).
That’s down slightly from the previous quarter, when 72.3% were considered affordable, but way up from the third quarter of 2008 when only 56.1% qualified.
The NAHB judges a home to be affordable if a family making the metro area’s median income could buy it if they devote no more than 28% of their take-home pay toward housing costs.Read the rest of this entry »
