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Buying homes for sale requires research, planning and financial management, so if you are planning to buy a home, this free downloadable PDF document from the Office of Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden is a very helpful PDF that you need to read.

This free document was prepared by Attorney General Wasden for residents and prospective home buyers in Idaho, but a large portion of information in this document apply also to residents and home buyers in other states. So even if you do not live in Idaho, you can download this document, which has just been released this October, and benefit from it.

According to the PDF, before buying a home, you need to examine your credit scores, financial readiness and your loan pre-qualification.

Most lenders use the FICO credit score to evaluate your credit-worthiness. FICO refers to credit rating agency Fair Isaac Corporation. If your FICO credit score is higher than 700, you are considered financially healthy by lenders, but if your credit score is below 600, you are considered a high risk.

Attorney General Wasden advises buyers to delay their plan of buying homes for sale if their credit score is poor because lenders assign higher mortgage rates to high-risk debtors. Besides, banks no longer offer subprime or nontraditional loans.

To calculate if you can afford to buy a house, use mortgage calculators available at fhaoutreach.gov. You should not consider future salary increases because they may never come and you should have 20 percent of the home price ready for down payment. Additionally, you should not be allotting over 30 percent of your monthly income for your monthly home loan payment.

Remember also that closing on a home is very costly. Depending on your agreement with the seller, you may be required to pay various fees that include fees for loan application, appraisal, home inspection, credit report, document processing, prepaid interest, private mortgage insurance, insurance escrow, title closing, title insurance, recording, taxes, flood certification and home association. You can get more information about closing costs at federalreserve.gov.

Under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, when you are buying a house, you are entitled to receive written disclosures from your lender or broker before and during closing and as you pay your mortgage loan through the years. These disclosures will inform you about closing costs, escrow accounts and other activities related to your loan account so you can guard yourself against people victimizing people buying homes for sale.

Real estate foreclosure listings in Redford, Michigan continue to grow, based on data from the Redford Township Business Association.

According to Robert Miller, deputy supervisor for Redford, around 2,000 homes will be foreclosed this year in the area. Just like other places in Michigan, Redford has been following the foreclosure trend in the state.

In the July to September quarter, more than 37,000 residential properties throughout the state were hit with foreclosure postings, with almost 15,000 already in the foreclosure books of lenders. With the continued increase in foreclosures in the state, Michigan was ranked eighth in the third quarter based on foreclosure rates.

To help contain foreclosure properties in Redford, Thomas Krause, head and founder of the Redford business association, and other members committed to help distressed families avoid foreclosures. They planned to work with Bruce Kaufman, a mortgage restructuring specialist who owns HHAF Systems LLC and who has been negotiating loan modification successfully with lenders.

Early this year, Redford officials tried to launch a foreclosure prevention program that involved HHAF Systems, but the program fell through. The program would have prevented distressed properties from getting into real estate foreclosure listings with only around $500 in fees per mortgage modification and with the fees getting paid by state or federal agencies.

Even if the initial effort to work with Kaufman collapsed, the township has been supporting the plans of RTBA and encouraging business leaders and other associations to help families in Redford save their homes from foreclosure.

To help start the modifications, the association will be conducting fund raising efforts. In November, RTBA will hold a fundraising event at the Timber Wolf Tavern.

Bill Kanbilian, founder of Little Bill?s Trophies, explained that RTBA decided to help solve the problem of foreclosure homes not only to help families, but also to help themselves. Business people know that if communities are overloaded with foreclosed properties and families abandon communities, they will be left with no customers to serve.

Additionally, values of properties will deteriorate, including the values of their office spaces and their business spaces.

Kaufman of HHAF said that he has reduced his mortgage modification fee to only $150, a sharp drop from the usual $500 charged by loan modification firms in the area.

Both Kaufman and Krause reiterated that launching the program to contain real estate foreclosure listings in Redford requires determination to face challenges, but they need to do it to save their township from deterioration.

The $13.5-billion Guaranty Bank based in Austin, Texas will be closed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. this week, marking the second-largest bank failure in 2009.

According to bank analysts, the bank was crushed by its option adjustable rate mortgage loans, which comprised nearly one-third of its single family home loan portfolio.

In addition, the bank had provided $1.2 billion in loans to homebuilders primarily in California, where many homes turned into foreclosed houses for sale when borrowers failed to pay their home loans.

In the second quarter, Guaranty declared a loss of $174 million, according to a report from the Office of Thrift Supervision. The bank tried but failed to raise additional capital.

Shares of the bank have declined by over 95 percent since 2008. Among prominent stockholders are hotel businessman Robert Rowling and corporate investor Carl Icahn.

Guaranty would be the fourth Texas bank to fail after the collapse of the housing market. It would also be the second largest bank failure in Texas, based on FDIC reports. The largest in the state was the bank failure of $17.1-billion First Republic Bank of Dallas in July 1988.

According to some reports, Spain-based Banco Bilbao Vizcaya won the right to acquire the bank in a bidding.
Other banks reported to have filed their bids to buy Guaranty were the newly-chartered bank of Gerald Ford and his private equity partners, JPMorgan Chase and Toronto Dominion.

According to several analysts, Guaranty Bank’s failure is significant, but it is not as staggering as the failure of banks in the 1980s when the energy-industry-driven construction boom collapsed.

During the years from 1980 to 1994, 599 banks in Texas collapsed. In 1989, a total of 223 thrifts and other banks closed, equivalent to four bank failures every week.

Dick Evans, head of Cullen/Frost Bankers, said Texas now has fewer housing-related problems than other states because its housing sector, having learned from the crisis in the 1980s, did not allow home prices to shoot up. Cullen/Frost Bankers acquired some of the failed banks in the 1980s.

According to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, home prices across Texas declined by only 0.6 percent compared to 2008. Evans, however, said that while banks in Texas are holding up much better than those in other states battered by foreclosures, banks across the state expect slower growth.

The luxury hotel condominium Trump International Hotel and Tower in Fort Lauderdale, Florida is facing foreclosure, heavily burdened by unpaid construction loans amounting to $182 million.

Freddie Mac posted its first net income in 2 years in the second-quarter report it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission despite losses to foreclosures homes.

Recently, signs of housing market recovery from the price effects of foreclosure for sale have been seen, such as the increase in sales of new homes in June by 11 percent for the third straight month.

After Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were saved by the federal government from collapse last year, the Obama administration has been employing these two large government-sponsored enterprises mainly to help contain the problem of foreclosed house for sale inventories.

Two mansions in Western New York will be sold in a foreclosed homes auction by John A. Russo, heir to the Sorrento Cheese Co. fortune, after the buyer failed to pay the first scheduled $1 million payment due last May 1.

Families of foreclose houses who are in danger of homelessness may find help with Community Storehouse, a nonprofit organization based in Keller, Texas. The nonprofit organization is set to receive about $1 million from the federal stimulus program.

Unemployment is the major driver of the growing foreclosure lists in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. This is the conclusion made by industry experts who pointed out that the coming wave of foreclosures in the area is linked on unemployment than bad mortgage products.