Home Mortgage Guide

A mortgage loan is a loan secured by real property through the use of a mortgage (a legal instrument). However, the word mortgage alone, in everyday usage, is most often used to mean mortgage loan.

A home buyer or builder can obtain financing (a loan) either to purchase or secure against the property from a financial institution, such as a bank, either directly or indirectly through intermediaries. Features of mortgage loans such as the size of the loan, maturity of the loan, interest rate, method of paying off the loan, and other characteristics can vary considerably.

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The United States Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (or HMDA, pronounced HUM-duh) was passed in 1975. It requires financial institutions to maintain and annually disclose data about home purchases, home purchase pre-approvals, home improvement, and refinance applications involving 1 to 4 unit and multifamily dwellings. It also requires branches and loan centers to display a HMDA poster.

HMDA was designed by the Federal Reserve Board in order to:

• Help public officials to distribute public-sector investments
• Discover if financial institutions are serving housing needs of communities
• Identify where there are discriminatory lending practices. (more…)

Definitions of Home mortgage on the Web:

A reverse mortgage (known as lifetime mortgage in the United Kingdom) is a loan available to seniors (62 and older in the United States), and is used to release the home equity in the property as one lump sum or multiple payments. The homeowner’s obligation to repay the loan is deferred until the owner dies, the home is sold, or the owner leaves (e.g., into aged care).

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Down payment (or downpayment) is a term used in the context of the purchase of expensive items such as a car and a house, whereby the payment is the initial upfront portion of the total amount due and it is usually given in cash at the time of finalizing the transaction. A loan is then required to make the full payment.

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Title is a legal term for a bundle of rights in a piece of property in which a party may own either a legal interest or an equitable interest. The rights in the bundle may be separated and held by different parties. It may also refer to a formal document that serves as evidence of ownership. Conveyance of the document may be required in order to transfer ownership in the property to another person. Title is distinct from possession, a right that often accompanies ownership but is not necessarily sufficient to prove it. In many cases, both possession and title may be transferred independently of each other.

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A creditor is a party (e.g. person, organization, company, or government) that has a claim to the services of a second party. The first party, in general, has provided some property or service to the second party under the assumption (usually enforced by contract) that the second party will return an equivalent property or service. The second party is frequently called a debtor or borrower.

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Home Ownership means the act of owning and occupying a house and the person who owns the house is called the owner-occupier. An owner-occupier is a person who lives in a house that he or she owns. Homes also include condominums, apartments, and housing cooperatives. The immovable property, including the home and the land it sits upon, is known as real estate.

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Real estate is a legal term (in some jurisdictions, notably in the USA, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia) that encompasses land along with anything permanently affixed to the land, such as buildings, specifically property that is stationary, or fixed in location.

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Foreclosure is the legal proceeding in which a mortgagee, usually a lender, obtains a court ordered termination of a mortgagor’s equitable right of redemption. Usually a lender obtains a security interest from a borrower who mortgages or pledges an asset like a house to secure the loan. If the borrower defaults and the lender tries to repossess the property, courts of equity can grant the owner the right of redemption if the borrower repays the debt. When this equitable right exists, the lender cannot be sure that it can successfully repossess the property, thus the lender seeks to foreclose the equitable right of redemption.

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