FHA loans — you know, those loans that, when push comes to shove, we as citizens get to insure — have risen to almost a quarter of all home loans from 3% just a few years ago. Why? Because apparently they don’t care who they loan to:

FHA also has tightened lending standards, requiring a 10% down payment for those with credit scores below 500.

When 10% down payment for a credit score below 500 is an indication of tightened standards, you just have to laugh. Or cry.

Someone with a score in that range has shown an obvious lack of financial acumen, and has no business with a credit card with a $1,000 limit much less a home loan of potential $100s of thousands. Until one has shown at least the modicum of restraint — and a sub-500 credit score is just about the exact opposite — the dream of home ownership should remain precisely that: a dream.

While I am certainly no fan of the tactics of many in the credit card industry, sometimes I’m not so sure we don’t get precisely what we deserve. For instance, in public comments to regulators on their credit card gripes, we see one commenter lamenting, apparently, the reality of time passing:

I agree that 30 days late is late — one day is not late!

Has our education system gotten so poor that we cannot even grasp simple words like late anymore?

late: Coming, occurring, or remaining after the correct, usual, or expected time; delayed

As I said earlier this year, one of my goals for the year was to find a few new sources of secondary income. One of the paths I’ve taken to meet that goal has me flirting with the domaining business (yes, that’s an affiliate link, and yes, the info is worth every red cent). I’m no Kevin Ham or anything [yet ], but I’m slowly and steadily building my virtual real estate empire. It’s always interesting to browse through what some are willing to pay for a domain name and get a little inspiration.

In catching up with the news from the latest auctions, I just had to shake my head at America’s Team and their utter ineptitude in fumbling the auction of a great piece of VRE: Cowboys.com. Thinking they were going to get a prime domain like Cowboys.com for $275 rather than a more realistic $275,000 (but still insanely cheap — if that were a domain in my stable, I’d be looking for another zero to be tacked on) is cluelessness on a grand scale. Pleading poverty certainly won’t work. After all, they are spending in excess of a billion on their new stadium. The $275k would barely be a rounding error.

Moron of the Year, indeed…

Apparently, primarily for two-and-a-half hours a day of mind numbing TV.

Having just completed another quick read through Joe Dominguez’s excellent Your Money or Your Life and contemplating the exchange of life for money that we all do, I stumbled (via LifeHack) upon a bunch of interesting stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: the American Time Use Survey.

And looking through the results all I can think is “my, what boring lives we are living…”

One-third of life working away in order to afford the rest.

One-third of life sleeping away.

Not even one-third of that remaining one-third spent on ‘leisure time’.

And with that pittance of leisure that we do afford ourselves, I’m sure we make great use of it:

Well, I guess not. Half spent rotting in front of the idiot box! Well, at least we’re getting our money’s worth from the cable bill…

No Impact Man shared a few infinitely better ways to spend that leisure time. Maybe it’s time to make TV Turnoff Week a permanent thing…

I have one house, I drive a Jeep Cherokee, I live very simply. I discovered in life that I have the same joy in divestment as I once got as a young man in acquisition. I have the perfect house. I’m never leaving this house that I’m in. I might trade my Jeep in for some environment-friendly vehicle of some kind. But I’m not into fancy cars. My watch is a Casio. I live very simply, and I’ve discovered that half of the so-called luxuries that people strive for do not provide happiness. My happiness comes from my children, my wife, my house that I love that I live in.

Stewart Copeland is my non-PF PF hero of the day…

(And as a member of Oysterhead, as well as that other little band he was in, he already holds a dear place in my heart!)

Blog Carnivals are a great way to get a bit more exposure to those who might never stumble across your little site, as well as finding new sites to add to your reading list, but forever neglecting to submit anything sure doesn’t accomplish anything…

This week, one of my posts — ‘Apparently I Feel Differently About Debt‘ — appears in two of them:

• First off, I made an appearance on the always overwhelming Carnival of Personal Finance, hosted, minimally (a big fan of simplicity myself!), this week by Matthew @ Getting Green.
• My second showing is in the 91st episode of the Carnival of Debt Reduction, hosted by NCN on his podcast satellite site. (Oh, and helluva job on the PF front in general there, NCN!)

Thanks so much, both of you, for the effort involved in going through all those submissions, and making some sort of sense of them! And if you like a little sporadic publishing (I publish like I used to pay – irregularly – though I’m working on fixing that!), feel free to add my feed to your reader.

One of our budget items that always seems out of whack compared to what I see the frugalistas out there in the personal finance blog realm is our food budget. I’ve seen a claims of grocery expense for a family of three in the less-than-$150 range. Three meals a day for three people (even if one of them is really 1/4 of the other two… ) for around $5 a day just doesn’t seem feasible to me. Irregardless, that amount is substantially less than what ours ends up being.

But even when those line items were tracked in different categories, we were still spending quite a bit more than $5 (or, for that matter, $10) a day on groceries. We’re doing slightly better now than we did back then because we’ve gotten into preplanning our meals (makes shopping a ton more efficient), but I’d still be surprised if we spent much less than $300 a month solely on what we eat. But why so much? I think MyMoneyBlog may have just given me my answer.

WiseGeek recently put up an interesting post showing what 200 calories worth of a vast array of food look like. And MyMoneyBlog went a step further and put up a great followup post on the cost of those different 200 calories. And what conclusion can I reach from the info?

Healthy foods cost more to get the same calorie benefit. Specifically, fresh fruits and vegetables are very expensive, especially compared to cheap carbs and processed foods (on a $/calorie basis anyway). The wife and I realized 5 or 6 years ago that we were, well, flat out getting fat. A few scary vacation pictures convinced us that maybe, just maybe, a little more attention to our health was necessary. And we’ve slowly but surely jacked up our amount of exercise (myself from a level of zero) along with eating much healthier. These days, it’s really a rarity that we eat a meal that has all that much processed food or huge amounts of carbs in it at all anymore, and there are always fresh fruit and veggies around. And we’ve each dropped a bunch of weight and feel infinitely better.

So, is it time to cut back until we get into better financial shape? Nah, not necessarily. We may pay a little more attention to what’s on sale, continue to improve our meal planning, maybe even sign up with a local CSA if we can find one nearby to save on that veggie bill. But the overall improvement in our life that being conscious of our physical health provides is much more important to us. And if that slows us down from getting out of debt by a little while, so be it…

[tags]groceries,budget,healthy eating,CSA,community supported agriculture,meal planning,diet,200 calories[/tags]

When will I learn? Always pick up a few shares of Apple prior to the Macworld address.

Earlier today Apple announced their Crackberry killer, the iPhone. And we see Apple stockholders 8%+ richer. Not too bad a return for a speech and some eye candy! (But those poor Research in Motion stockholders. Ouch!)

That said, I crave the features on this like I craved the digital camera integrated in my current phone. Meaning, well, not at all. Just give me a simple, cheap phone that works (even after I drop it a hundred times) and I’ll be thrilled.

[tags]AAPL,RIM,Apple,Research in Motion,iPhone,macworld[/tags]

I’ve shopped at Macy’s. Not frequently but, then again, not infrequently. The few times I’ve had any problem with something I had bought, Macy’s made it an almost pleasant experience correcting the problem. But I won’t be shopping at Macy’s again. George at Fat Pitch Financial shares his experience with returning a pair of jeans at Macy’s, and their request for his social security number to go about doing that. It’s bad enough that they are asking for a social security number in the first place just to return some wrong-sized clothing. But after your refusal to provide a potential dangerous (and entirely useless to them) piece of information, repeatedly asserting that “it’s the store policy” and having to involve a manager in an everyday transaction is patently absurd.

I’ve been reading quite a bit of Seth Godin lately. In fact, I just finished his book Purple Cow (might just have to put up a review of it a little later). In it, he puts forth the idea that standard marketing just doesn’t work anymore. That you must make yourself or your product remarkable to grab the attention of today’s fickle consumer.

And Macy’s is being remarkable. Unfortunately for them, with this policy, they’re being remarkably bad. Guess what, Macy’s. The products you offer are no longer unique. They haven’t been unique for quite some time. Name brand clothes can be had just about anywhere. The experience of shopping at Macy’s is what is unique. And if this is the experience you’re handing out, I can do better elsewhere…

[tags]Macy’s,customer service,social security number,SSN,purple cow,remarkable[/tags]

The folks at the Motley Fool are reporting on a new addition to the tax laws: the ability to tack on your Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI) payments to your itemized deduction in 2007 like you do your mortgage interest payments.

I really like this little snippet:

Unlike your mortgage, which you’ll probably pay for decades, private mortgage insurance can come to a relatively quick end.

And of course, that is true, depending on how you define relatively. On a, for instance, age of the universe scale, 11 years is relatively quickly. To me, 11 years of PMI for a one year deduction just doesn’t seem like that wonderful of a deal. Wait, what was that? You didn’t notice that the law, as currently written, allows this deduction for a single year? Hmmm, yeah, I can see how you might have missed that, as it they certainly didn’t spend much time on that particular fact.

Even for 2007 — when this provision will actually be in effect — I just don’t see how paying $4 to the mortgage company to save an additional $1 on my taxes is anything but, well, stupidity. (I’ve seen a couple posts by people who seems excited by the proposition, but I can’t seem to find the posts in my history or I’d trackback ‘em just to see if I could get a decent justification on how this is a particularly good idea.)

While it may be a slight help to the potential homeowner, the private mortgage insurers are the true winners with this. It will just make it more likely that those with a weak grasp of the big picture – “Hey, we get to write off that PMI thing! Let’s go get that house we can’t afford!” – are that much more likely to justify to themselves taking out that zero-down-payment loan.

Oh, and to top it all off, I get to answer excited question about this for the next 4 months…

Yeah, me!

[tags]PMI,private mortgage insurance,mortgage,taxes,itemized deductions[/tags]