Rarely is a movie sequel better than the original. I feared that HARP II (Home Affordable Refinance Program) would be another empty “cotton candy” promise from Washington with a lot of fluff and no substance.

A divorce mortgage is a refinance transaction that removes the departing spouse from the current debt secured by the home or other real estate. The spouse retaining the property refinances the loan that is currently in both parties name with a loan in their name alone.

When our automobile needs a tune-up, it provides us with plenty of clues: hard to start, rough running, poor gas mileage, etc. But when a mortgage needs a tune-up it gives no warning.

Last week my neighborhood got about a foot of snow. While running around doing last minute Christmas shopping, I noticed the wiser, more experienced drivers took a slow steady pace and went forward with a minimum of frustration.

Unfortunately, some of the terms in the mortgage industry are not applied uniformly. My favorite example concerns a mortgage that supposedly has no closing costs.

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) has left loan limits unchanged for both forward (purchase and refinance mortgages), as well as Home Equity Conversion Mortgages (HECM).

About half of the mortgages I will close in December are for people who have an existing FHA mortgage and thought they could not refinance because of all the misinformation floating around about the current mortgage environment.

Most of the time, the sequel to a movie is never as good as the original. Recently the federal government announced that it was reviving the Home Ownership Refinancing Program (HARP) allowing homeowners who owe more their home is worth to refinance.

The Ratchet Effect is one of the few economic theories that has any relation to reality. As President Harry Truman succinctly observed, if you laid every economist end to end, they would point in every direction, and only be able to explain things after they have happened.

Freddie Mac reported last week that the average on the 30-year fixed mortgage rose sharply from 3.94% to 4.12%, which according to the National Bureau of Economic Research was the lowest rate ever.