HOW TO REMOVE AN EX-HUSBAND’S NAME FROM THE TITLE

I received a phone call from a woman who told me that she had been referred to me by her financial planner. As soon as she told me who the financial planner was, I had a pretty good idea what kind of case this would be, because her planner is specialized in helping women who were going through divorce.

This time the situation seemed simple. The client and her husband owned two properties. They had decided to sell one of them. The other was a condominium where she lived with her mother, and she wanted to keep it. There was only one problem. Her husband’s name was on the title, along with her mother’s and her own name. She wanted to keep the condominium, and to  remove her husband’s and mother’s name from the title. To do that, we need to refinance their existing mortgage.

The question was: Could she qualify for the mortgage by herself? Normally, the first thing I look at is income. In her case, there wasn’t much conventional income. Her main source of income was from helping and caring for her elderly mother.

At first, it looked like a challenge. But then I learned something important. Over the years, she had accumulated and saved money in retirement accounts. When we looked at the numbers, she had more than $1 million in her IRA accounts. She didn’t have a large conventional income, but she had substantial assets. That changed the picture.

I was able to use a program that allowed qualifying income to be calculated from her assets. It is sometimes called an Assets depletion program, because the lender calculates a qualifying income amount by treating a portion of eligible assets as if they were being used over a specified period of time. That gave us enough qualifying income for her to obtain the mortgage she needed. She could keep the condominium under her own name. And she could do it while the divorce was still in progress.

This was not something I learned from a textbook. I learned many of these tricks of the trade during more than 20 years of working closely with a divorce attorney who specialized in helping people reach amicable divorces. Over the years, I learned that when people are going through a divorce, the problem is not always simply, “Who gets the house?” Sometimes the real question is: How can we structure the financing so that the person who wants to keep the house can actually afford to keep it?

There can be more than one way to solve a mortgage problem. You have to look beyond the obvious. In this case, her income was not enough by itself. But her assets told a different story. And that was the key to finding the solution.

If you’re planning to get a mortgage and want to know whether your loan can actually be done, give me a call. I know how to help.

Manny Kagan
Mortgage Broker | 40+ Years of Experience
(415) 225-7920

SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO GO OUT… AND SMELL THE ROSES

When I decided to check where the phrase “Go out and smell the roses” came from, I discovered that the actual expression is “stop and smell the roses.” It is often attributed to the American golfer Walter Hagen, who wrote: “You only live once—but if you work it right, once is enough.” He also wrote about not hurrying and making sure to smell the flowers along the way.

But I see a slightly different meaning in the idea of “go out and smell the roses.” Instead of waiting for the roses to be in front of us, sometimes we have to make an effort to go out and find them. For us, one of those places is  Portland, Oregon.

Portland is known as the “City of Roses.” During World War I, roses and other plants in Europe were threatened by the war, and Portland became a safe place for preserving and growing roses. Today, the International Rose Test Garden has hundreds of varieties. We visited it last year, and the experience was overwhelming—in the best possible way.

Not far from where our daughter and her family live, there are four squares covered with roses. The gardens are  divided into different sections, so you can walk from one area to another and have a completely different experience with the roses.

We came back again this time. The smell of the roses was overwhelming. But what impressed me even more was seeing how many different people came there simply to enjoy them. I saw teenagers who came especially to smell the roses. I saw a family having lunch. I met a woman who had been taking care of the same small section of the garden for 27 years. The sections are cared for by volunteers, many of whom have developed a personal relationship with their little piece of the garden. I saw another woman sitting on a bench, reading and writing notes.

My granddaughter loved the place because there is a swing nearby. She spent time swinging while my wife and daughter sat on a bench. And I thought: What could be more enjoyable than this?

Sometimes we have to go out and smell the roses. And you don’t have to travel to Portland. Here in the Bay Area, we have the Rose Garden in Golden Gate Park. It is smaller than what we experienced in Portland, but it can provide the same opportunity to stop, look, smell, and simply enjoy being alive. So, my suggestion is simple: Go out and find your roses.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be roses. It can be flowers, trees, the ocean, a park, a bench, a garden—or simply a place where you can sit and enjoy the moment. Sometimes, you just have to make the effort to go out and smell them.

In my last Friday’s story, you can see three roses which I photographed in the garden especially for my last week’s post. If you would like to see more beautiful flowers and read words of wisdom, you can find it all in my book Reflections which you can buy on Amazon.  

Thank you. And share this story with a friend.

Russian roulette is a dangerous game of chance in which a single bullet is placed in a revolver, the cylinder is spun, and the trigger is pulled without knowing what will happen. I use this expression because I’m currently working with two clients who, in my mind, were playing mortgage Russian roulette.

The first client was buying a condominium in Millennium Tower. I have already closed 16 transactions there. She was told that Wells Fargo could finance the building. Two weeks later, she discovered they could not.

She came to me with very little time left to get the loan approved. Because I knew the building and which lenders could work with it, I was able to get her approval—and everything is now on track.

The second client was buying a condominium in another building that is involved in a lawsuit concerning the building owners and the parking lot. A lawsuit can make financing a condominium much more complicated.

I sent the complete package to six different banks. Only one said yes—and we are moving forward with that lender.

In both cases, the clients were dealing with lenders who were not equipped to handle the particular circumstances of the buildings. The clients had no way of knowing that, and neither did their real estate agents.

That is why I don’t play mortgage Russian roulette.

I know which lenders can handle difficult condominium loans, and when a particular lender cannot do the loan, I look for one that can. Otherwise, you can waste weeks of everyone’s time and potentially lose the property.

If you’re planning to get a mortgage and want to know whether your loan can actually be done, give me a call.

I know how to help.

Manny Kagan
Mortgage Broker | 40+ Years of Experience
415-225-7930