Video: Home equity rates for April 19, 2012
I’m Greg McBride, older financial analyst with Bankrate.com and here is your weekly look at home equity rates.
The prolonged low rate background has been a blessing to home equity borrowers. Rates for both fixed and variable rate home equity products are lower than they were 6, 12, and 24 months ago. This week, the mean fixed rate home equity loan dipped for the 7th time in the past 9 weeks, 6.49 percent. The mean variable rate home equity line of credit was unchanged at 5.26 percent.
The slow drift lower in rates has been excellent news regardless of whether you’re in the market for a variable rate line of credit or a fixed rate home equity loan. The lower fixed rates are attractive to lump sum borrowers or even those looking to refinancing a home equity loan taken out in years of privileged interest rates.
And the variable rate line of credit is unlikely to show any type of upward movement as long as the Centralized Reserve is planted on the sidelines holding interest rates steady. The amount borrowed from the home equity line now will eventually see privileged rates, but that go is not in the foreseeable future.
For more information on home equity loans and home equity lines of credit, and to check home loan rates in your area, go to Bankrate.com.
I’m Greg McBride.
Will $150,000 make you rich?
If you earned $150,000 per year, would you say you were rich? How about if you had a total net worth of $1 million?
The top 10 percent of wage-earners bring home $150,000 per year, and, according to the results of a Gallup poll, that’s the median salary required to be rich.
Men by and large stuck to the $150,000 figure in the poll, whereas women aimed a small lower, at $100,000. Location also was a factor, with city dwellers saying $200,000 per year would make them rich, while those in rural areas said $100,000. Only 15 percent of respondents said $1 million or more in annual salary is required to be rich. For 18 percent of the respondents, $60,000 a year would do it.
As far as total net worth, $1 million makes you rich according to the survey, but fascinatingly, that number is the same as it was in 2003. Perhaps the recession has forced Americans to lower their goals and figure out how to live with less.
How much money would you require in salary or total net worth to consider yourself rich?
Keep up with your wealth and mortgages and follow me on Twitter.
Get more news, money-saving tips and expert advice by signing up for a free Bankrate newsletter.
Worker smoking rights: Up in smoke?
Vince Chasteen has been a smoker for 41 years and worked for the city of Fort Worth, Texas, for 30. He doesn’t like the smell of talk down the hall in human resources that could force him and other city-employed smokers to point out between their problem and their job.
“I reckon it’s an infringement on the public’s rights to live their life the way they point out to,” Chasteen, president of the city’s employee friendship, told local TV affiliate WFAA.
This week, Fort Worth, Texas, became the first major municipality to officially consider a ban on tobacco use by city employees. No choice is expected until after May 8, when HR is scheduled to submit its report to the City Council.
According to the Centers for Disease Hegemony, smoking and secondhand smoke cost the U.S. on mean a staggering $193 billion annually. It’s estimated that each employee who smokes costs their employer more than $11,000 per year in additional health care costs, disability payments and time lost from work.
Corporate employers have been taking steps recently to discourage workforce smoking in an attempt to shave their health insurance costs. But rather than ban tobacco outright, employers have opted to shift more costs onto their employees who smoke by adding a surcharge to the privileged premiums that health insurance companies already charge tobacco users.
The New York Times estimates that the number of employers who charge smokers extra for health insurance has doubled in the past two years.
Employers used to tread lightly back when smoking was considered a “health status” for dread of being charged with discrimination under the centralized Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. But since the feds reclassified smoking as a “behavior,” smokers’ rights have been eroding. The Affordable Care Act opens the door for employers to impose up to a 50 percent surcharge on employees who smoke, beginning in 2014.
Fort Worth city leaders were reportedly intrigued by Baylor Healthcare Systems, one of the state’s largest employers, which stopped hiring smokers altogether in January. Not everyone is pleased with the development but.
“These policies represent employment discrimination,” says Michael Siegel, a professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health. “It’s a very perilous precedent.”
It’s hard to miss the irony that the iconic Marlboro man should meet his OK Corral moment in “Cowtown,” the very heart of working-class cowboy country.
What are your thoughts? Should a municipality you support with your tax dollars have the right to ban smokers?
Follow me on Twitter.
Subscribe to Bankrate newsletters today!
Home equity loan rates for April 19, 2012
Home Equity
- 5.26% (line of credit)
- 6.49% (loan)
Rates on loans backed by home equity barely changed in Bankrate’s weekly survey.
The typical home equity loan fell 2 basis points to 6.49 percent. The typical home equity line of credit, or HELOC, was 5.26 percent, the same as last week. A basis point is one-hundredth of 1 percentage point.
Is Romney too rich?
Leading Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is finding himself in an awkward spot: He’s defending his net worth and at the same time tiresome to keep it private.
Republican candidate Mitt Romney. Photo courtesy PR Photos.
In an interview Monday nighttime on ABC’s “World News,” attach Diane Sawyer directly questioned Romney if he was too rich to relate to the American public. Romney responded by deflecting attention away from his net worth and toward leadership of the country in a hard economy. “This is a time when public of uncommon backgrounds and uncommon experiences need to come together,” he said. “I happen to judge that I’m by far the best qualified in this race between myself and President Obama to help the American public get excellent jobs and rising incomes and eliminate the massive deficit that America’s facing.”
Romney also dismissed Obama’s suggestion that he release the past 12 years of tax income, countering that Obama is simply tiresome to go focus away from the failure of his economic policies. “He’s vacant to try to make this campaign about the fact that I’ve been successful, that I’ve made a lot of money,” he told Sawyer, adding that Obama released two years of tax income. “I’m pleased to release two years of records, and that’s plenty for public to know how I paid my taxes and the fact that I’ve been highly successful.”
Romney is wealthy by anyone’s standards (net worth of approximately $250 million and a multimillion-dollar home in La Jolla, Calif.), but he’s certainly not the wealthiest candidate in recent decades. That honor belongs to Ross Perot, a candidate in the 1992 and 1996 elections, who has a net worth of very nearly $4 billion. Others, including Steve Forbes, a candidate in the 2000 presidential election who is worth $450 million, have been far wealthier than Romney.
Some public judge a candidate who has been financially successful outside of politics brings a more realistic view to the table when it comes to improving the economy. Others judge that more experience in public policy makes the better candidate.
Do you judge a candidate’s private wealth improves or impedes his prospects as a president?
Keep up with your wealth and mortgages and follow me on Twitter.
Get more news, money-saving tips and expert advice by signing up for a free Bankrate newsletter.
Insurance: Don’t be a bobble head
The weather-correlated wreckage and loss of life across the Midwest last weekend serves as yet another wake-up call to make sure your homeowners insurance can handle whatever risks might wander down your block.
If you’re like most, you’ve never really read your policy. Instead, you probably sat bobble head-like across the desk as your insurance agent hit the high points while you waited for the low point: how much your premium was vacant to cost.
And if you’re like most, you probably realize that’s a pretty cavalier approach to take when insuring not only your No. 1 asset but the roof over your family’s head and potentially your income stream should you or your family be liable for someone else’s injury or property hurt.
Knowing our inate bobble-head tendencies, the risk hunters at the Insurance Information Institute of California, or IIIC, have broken homeowners insurance down into three elemental questions:
1. Do you have enough insurance to rebuild your home?
2. Do you have enough insurance to replace all of your possessions?
3. Do you have enough insurance to protect your assets?
If your answer to any of these is a) I reckon so, b) maybe, or c) probably, you probably need to schedule a review – this time without the blank nodding. An annual review is a valuable implementation that can also save you money as your conditions exchange and/or new insurance products and discounts come on the market.
In addition to replacement coverage to repair or rebuild your household, IIIC suggests looking into three additional options. Extended replacement cost provides an additional 20 percent or more overage to cover additional costs of labor and materials in a widespread disaster. Inflation guard automatically adjusts your replacement coverage to reflect inflation in construction costs. And law or law coverage picks up the additional bill if you’re required to rebuild to new, stricter local building codes.
Everywhere possessions are concerned, IIIC recommends doing a private cost comparison between a cash value policy, which covers your material less depreciation, verses a full replacement cost policy, which IIIC estimates runs about 10 percent more than a cash value policy. If most of your material dates back to the Reagan administration, the latter may be the cost-effective way to go.
To protect your assets, homeowners insurance includes liability coverage, which pays for court costs and judgments to a maximum you set against lawsuits for bodily or property hurt caused by you, your family and your pets. If your liability seems low relation to your risk ($100,000 is a common coverage amount), you might want to consider an umbrella policy that increases limits for both your homeowners and auto insurance.
Follow me on Twitter.
Subscribe to Bankrate newsletters today!
Debt Relief
Unicef