Current Mortgage Rates

Sunday, October 12, 2008



Ask yourself these questions to access your current financial health and see if you need debt consolidation help.
  1. Are you always late in paying your monthly bills?
  2. Have you reached or exceeded the limit on most of your credit cards?
  3. Are you only paying the minimum for your credit card balances?
  4. Are you dipping into your past savings, or worse you have used up your savings already?
  5. Do you find yourself having the need to use a credit line or cash advance to pay your monthly bills.
If you answer yes to most or all of the above questions, debt consolidation may just be the answer for you now. In additional, debt consolidation is often advisable in theory when someone is paying credit card debt. Credit cards can carry a much larger interest rate than even an unsecured loan from a bank. Debtors with property such as a home or car may get a lower rate through a secured loan using their property as collateral. Then the total interest and the total cash flow paid towards the debt is lower allowing the debt to be paid off sooner, incurring less interest. In practice, many people are in credit card debt because they spend more than their income. If that habit continues, the consolidation will not benefit them much because they will simply increase their credit card balances again. But before you start skipping down some financial yellow brick road to see the Wizard of Debt Consolidation, remember this: Watch out for those flying monkeys.

Three bad debt-consolidation moves:
  1. The Hard-Money Loan: if you are a credit risk, the consolidator may entice you with promises of an easy-does-it loan, and end up charging you higher interest rates than you're paying now - as high as 21% or 22%
  2. Debt Consolidators Who Promise to Take Care of Everything: In reality, many debt consolidators build in a fee as part of the monthly payment you make to them. It's usually about 10% of the payment. They pass along your payments to the creditor -- some debit directly from your checking account -- and get back a 10% to 15% slice that the relieved creditor is only too happy to rebate to the consolidator. s it worth paying someone else to do what you can do on your own, i.e. negotiate lower interest rates and stretch out your repayment schedule and pay off the highest-interest debts first?
  3. The Balance Transfer Trap: Low-interest balance-transfer cards are a dime a dozen these days, but remember that those rates only last a few months -- and then you have to switch cards again. The danger is that at some point all this activity begins to show up on your credit report, and you start to look like a bad risk.



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Current Mortgage Rates*

Loan Type
National Average
30-yr. fixed6.12%
30-yr. fixed jumbo7.62%
15-yr. fixed5.88%
15-yr. fixed jumbo7.12%
7/1 ARM6.25%
5/1 ARM6.00%
3/1 ARM5.88%
1-yr. ARM5.50%
1-yr. LIBOR ARM6.12%
10/1 ARM8.25%
40-yr. fixed7.12%
*Mortgage Rates Updated: 10/07/2008