Category: Mortgages and Insurance

Hurricane season opens June 1, 2026, and an unknown number of Florida homeowners with properties valued at $400,000 or more will enter it without wind coverage from the state’s insurer of last resort. The reason: they have not purchased a flood insurance policy, which Citizens Property Insurance Corporation now requires as a condition of providing…

Somewhere in Florida this spring, a homeowner opened a renewal notice, saw a five-figure number, and called an agent convinced it was a typo. That reaction has become routine in a state where the average annual home insurance premium now sits near $8,500, more than triple the national figure. But the sticker shock is no…

More than 330,000 Florida homeowners are about to pay less for property insurance. Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-backed insurer of last resort, will cut rates an average of 8.7 percent starting June 1, 2026, marking the first across-the-board reduction in its homeowners book in roughly eight years. For a policyholder paying near the statewide…

A homeowner in Galveston with a 14-year-old asphalt shingle roof and a $15,000 replacement estimate could collect barely $8,000 from a standard insurance policy after a hurricane. The rest, thousands of dollars, would come out of pocket. That scenario is not hypothetical. It is how “actual cash value” roof provisions work in a growing number…

Five months ago, a buyer shopping for a median-priced U.S. home could lock in a 30-year fixed mortgage near 5.75 percent, a level that, if reached, would represent the lowest reading on the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey since late 2024. (Freddie Mac’s PMMS showed rates in the 6.6 to 6.9 percent range through…

A seller-funded mortgage rate buy-down cuts a buyer’s monthly payment by about $200 for two years – but the money is wasted if you sell or refinance inside 24 months A home seller in a June 2026 purchase contract offers to fund a temporary mortgage rate buydown. The buyer’s monthly payment drops by a few…

Picture a 75-year-old homeowner who has lived in the same house for decades, never borrowed a dime against a reverse mortgage, and owes nothing on the original loan balance. Now picture that homeowner receiving a foreclosure notice. Not because the bank called the loan due or the balance ballooned beyond the home’s value, but because…

Atlantic hurricane season officially opens on June 1, 2026. For a coastal homeowner whose dwelling is insured at $400,000 with a 5% wind deductible, that date carries a specific price tag: $20,000 out of pocket before the insurance company writes a check. Not $500. Not $1,000. Twenty thousand dollars, due at the worst possible moment,…

Every month, millions of conventional mortgage borrowers send a payment that includes a line item they no longer owe. Private mortgage insurance, the surcharge lenders require when a buyer puts down less than 20%, can legally be canceled the moment a homeowner’s equity reaches 20% of the home’s original value. But the overwhelming majority of…

A homeowner who locked in a 2.9-percent mortgage in the spring of 2021 is not going to miss that payment if there is any way to avoid it. Lose the house, and the next loan comes at nearly 7 percent. That calculus, repeated across tens of millions of households, helps explain one of the most…