Sydney Financial Group is offering a Utah home equity loan program for local borrowers looking to eliminate consumer debt, manage their finances, and pay off their home loans in half the time. The Utah home equity loan program has recently been improved and now includes extra features such as a debt priority system, a financial planning calculator, and a multiple mortgage tracker. Sydney Financial not only helps Beehive state residents take out a Utah home equity loan, the company provides their clients with the tools needed to use their new loans effectively.

First, Sydney Financials copyrighted software helps homeowners pay off their original home loans early by leveraging the money from their Utah home equity loan. In the early years of a typical home loan, over 80% of the total payments go towards interest. Sydney Financial shows borrowers how to use their Utah home equity loan to pay down the interest on their original home loan and own their home free and clear – often in half the time. Second, the Utah home equity line of credit is used to help pay off high-interest consumer debt. Most credit cards have extremely high interest rates, some in excess of 18%. Utah home equity loan rates are often ½ the prime credit card rate or less.

The Sydney Financial system helps borrowers use their Utah home equity loans to save when paying back credit card debt. Since the interest rate is lower, the borrower will be able to pay off the debt faster. Third, the unique software program helps the clients plan for retirement. By using a Utah home equity loan to pay off their original mortgage early, the homeowner will have extra money to save towards their retirement years. Software users can log on any time to see the progress they’ve made and the time they have left until retirement.

ROYAL Bank of Scotland has become the latest lender to tighten up its criteria by pulling its 100 per cent loan-to-value (LTV) mortgage range, sold through external financial advisers. While 100 per cent mortgages will still be available through RBS’s branch network, people will not be able to apply for them through mortgage brokers. Since the credit crunch, most lenders have limited their maximum LTV – the proportion of the value of a property someone can borrow on a mortgage – to reduce the amount of risky lending they do.

A spokesperson for RBS said: “We regularly review our mortgage range against the market and, in the light of recent competitor moves, we are withdrawing our mortgages with a loan to value greater than 95 per cent.” John Postlethwaite, consultant with Punter Southall Financial Management, said: “With lenders withdrawing their 100 per cent LTV mortgages, it’s getting more difficult for first-time buyers.”It smacks of double standards for RBS to still have these 100 per cent mortgages through branches, but not intermediaries.” Earlier this week, Scottish Widows Bank reduced the LTV on its professional mortgage from 110 per cent to 100 per cent.

The National Association of Mortgage Brokers (NAMB) announced its support for a plan to reform the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s single family housing loan guarantee program.  S. 2008, the “Home Ownership Made Easier Act” (HOME Act) introduced by Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA), would expand eligibility for mortgage refinancing. Currently, the USDA program does not allow the borrowers to refinance an existing non-USDA mortgage into the USDA program.

This bill will allow borrowers to refinance into USDA-backed loans regardless of the type of residential mortgage loan they currently have.” There are a lot of consumers who need immediate assistance,” said NAMB President George Hanzimanolis, “but we have a scarcity of good programs out there that can help.”

The bill would allow refinancing to eligible borrowers in order to pay off first or second mortgages, finance rehabilitation projects on their homes, cover closing costs or consolidate other debt. Mortgage brokers stand in a unique position to bring these reforms into reality for consumers.  By working through an approved lender, brokers give consumers access to an expanded selection of loan products including the refinancing opportunities made possible under S. 2008.

Loss claims in Quality Home Loans’ collapse have surged to $332 million as a three-way fight has broken out between the bankrupt lender, its investors and Pacificor, a Santa Barbara-based hedge fund that pumped more than $40 million into the company. The latest twist in the tangled Chapter 11 bankruptcy is a $60 million complaint by investors in Agoura Hills-based Quality Home Loans. Creditors have made $272 million in claims, and the investors’ filing pushed the total tab to the $332 million mark.

Last fall, a struggle broke out between John Gaiser, Quality Home Loans’ founder, and Michael Klein, the late Pacificor chief who publicly moved to take over the mortgage firm after it declared bankruptcy in August – a deal later rejected by the trustee overseeing the company. Since then, the “hard money” lender’s operations have ceased, it has shrunk from 191 employees to 10 and three major players are fighting over the assets:

• Investors in QHL Holdings Fund Ten and Golden State TD Investments – the entities used to fund Quality Home Loans’ lending – filed a $60 million complaint against the company and Gaiser, who lives in Camarillo.

• Independent of their investors’ filing, the QHL Holdings fund and the Golden State fund claim Quality Home Loans owes them $100 million and $75 million, respectively, for their help financing the lender’s home loans.

• Pacificor has asserted that Quality Home Loans owes it $42 million for cash infusions made in the months before the lender collapsed.

Bank of Ireland and ICS Building Society are to cut their fixed interest rate mortgages from the start of business tomorrow. The cuts apply to new and existing customers. Jonathan Byrne of Bank of Ireland said the reductions were a result of the bank’s monitoring of the cost of funds on the international money markets. Interest rates on these markets moved sharply higher as a result of the credit crunch but have come back in recent weeks.

Some good news for the housing market emerged yesterday, as the British Bankers’ Association reported “exceptionally strong” demand for funds to remortgage property. That would suggest that the credit crunch may not be affecting those refixing their mortgages quite yet, contrary to some of the more gloomy predictions about their plight. The BBA said the number of remortgage approvals rose to 79,016, up 17 per cent on December and up 39 per cent year-on-year as a raft of borrowers came off two- and three-year fixed rate deals, albeit usually with a “payment shock” as they moved on to the higher rates now generally charged. Remortgaging activity hit its highest monthly share of all mortgage approvals since the BBA began collecting data in 1997, at 49 per cent.

However the BBA numbers exclude the types of lender who specialized in the UK’s “sub-prime” sector. The number of mortgages approved – that is entirely new finance flowing into the property market – was also up on December, although that was an exceptionally low figure. Some 44,288 new mortgages were approved by the major banks in January, higher than expected by analysts. A total of £18bn was advanced to consumers during the month, up from £15.5bn in December, although the figure was down 4.7 per cent on a year earlier. Nonetheless, the new mortgage approval figures remain among the lowest on record, and down 31.3 per cent on January 2007. There was little in the data to shift the expectation of a stagnant real-estate market in 2008, and the suspicion that first-time buyers are finding it difficult to obtain a mortgage.