A refi would only be a single mortgage.

At the height of the market I refied based on a high appraisal. Took the money and bought a car for the wife. My mortage was $270 and then went to $300 after the refi.

This was a stupid idea. I listen to Dave Ramsey now.

A lot of builders operate on the line of credit based on their home value. He took money out to build other projects, many of my builder clients did this and are in big trouble now. They owe more than their home is worth.

we are trying to refi now. not for more money. we had to buy the house with a second mortgage. the second had a hi rate, the bigger one had a low rate. we never could get a rate that was lower than the big loan until now. problem is my house is a mess. i am tearing down the shop and building a new garage, i took the panaling off in the music room and sprayed in foam insulation for sound deadening for band practice/recording so that looks like crap. i left the sheetrock off for sound purposes. then part of the ceiling fell from the sound and i have not fixed that yet.
the appraiser is coming tomorrow. i know it wont apraise for what i need, but they can tack on a lenders insurance. which is fine. i can get the work done then get it re apraised. nothing like adding on more to a loan payment to make it easier to make the payments. even with the insurance our payment will go down.

i dont know when dan could have refi'd. he has not been there that long and with the crash of the housing market, i dont see how he could get $300k. i think the house is only 3 yrs old.
i saw they started the repo paper work back in april.

LOC. Say the house is appraised at $250 and he has a 50/50 LTV, ($125 for the lot and assume $0 in financed construction costs). He has $125 in equity. Bank'll give you ~75% of equity, more/less depending on other factors. So he has a LOC of ~$94.

If he maxed the LOC then he's got that on top of the $125, it's secured by the property and does not show up as a refi or 2nd.

Now if he only financed part of the lot then he has additional equity that could bring his LOC up over $100.

"I'm a good housekeeper. I kept every house I lived in." Za-Za Gabor...

Sorry, Mike...just tried to lighten it a bit. Probably didn't.

It was reported today that Americans lost over 500 BILLION dollars worth of value on their real estate this year.

They did it to themselves. Too bad for them, but stupid is as stupid does....

No, Americans lost nothing really. The huge downward cost corrections in RE were desperately needed to bring the market back to some semblance of reality.

Yup, they lost value that they never really had. This is simply an adjustment back to reality. Areas that didn't have stupidity bubbles are largely unaffected, such as my local market. It has slowed due to layoffs, but values are steady and homes are still selling.

i know he did construction and with the drop in building, i dont know if that did not make things worse for him. it seemed like he was not working a lot.

my friend lost his construction job. he was telling me yesterday that he got in on the obama program. it dropped his house payment from 1200 down to 700. he has had it pretty tough. his wife had cancer, 5 kids, now his wife has another disease, i think it is hepatits.

I still own a 5 year old home in Rocky Face, GA that I finally took a loss on just to rent it. Gave up selling it. There were 3 bank owned houses in my neighborhood, all about the same age as mine, that were not selling.

My rental condo just went from $25 a month positive to $275 a month negative. The ARM went down by more than a point, but it was an I/O and just started amortizing. But I'll be alright. Just this week a random realtor sent me a letter asking if I'd sell to his clients. So the market might be getting better in the neighborhood.

I have a friend who has rehabed about seventy five houses and had two high end houses on the marked when the crash hit and he was forclosed on at the tune of just over 3.5 mil.

Yep the industry has really tanked here. You can thank Bob Shaw, Shelby Peoples. and Harry Saul for that. They are the ones who fought tooth and nail for decades to keep other types of industrial growth out of this area because they were afraid it would drive their labor costs up . In my opinion they really screwed this area up. Maybe the VW plant will bring in some businesses.

and yet my property taxes keep going up! In fact the town is planning another reassessment after being reassessed one year ago. Anyone want to bet whether or not my taxes will go up or down?

I'm actually quite surprised that more of these homes haven't gone up in unexplainable blazes of glory recently. Astonished, really.