Darel Ansley, Sr Loan Officer NMLS# 500247

02/01/2024

If you want to learn about creating rental income with minimal cash, my friend Skip Hughes wants to share his knowledge. It's not a theory, he owns 32 rentals in Wenatchee. There is no program to sign up for.

03/31/2023

UNWANTED SOLICITORS:

I recently had a client apply for a mortgage, and she commented that she had to turn her cell phone off because she received 20+ unwanted phone calls from other lenders. I had forgotten to warn her that this often happens. There is a way to prevent these annoying telemarketing calls that I will mention below.

But first I want people to know that we don’t sell anyone’s data; the source of the problem is that the credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and Trans-Union) do sell the fact that the client has applied for a mortgage.

It upsets me that this happens for various reasons, but I don’t think I’m going to overturn the system; instead, I want to give everyone the method for preventing these calls from happening. The nice thing is, this will also prevent many other telemarketing calls. It’s not perfect, as it doesn’t block political parties or surveys, but I can attest that it does help.

All you need to do is register your phone number on this federal government website: https://brev.is/EqY4W

There is also an opt-out for junk mail (USPS); I did this, and it greatly reduced the volume in my mailbox. https://brev.is/Fu0E2 It asks for your SS number and date of birth, but those fields are not required.

Feel free to reach out with any questions.
Darel

is the official Consumer Credit Reporting Industry website to accept and process requests from consumers to Opt-In or Opt-Out of firm offers of credit or insurance.

01/11/2023

Want to move but don't want to give up your low interest rate?
Stay in your home and renovate.

Peoples Bank offers a Renovation loan that allows you to keep your current mortgage and take out a second mortgage just for the renovation portion.

Don't buy your dream home, create it!

Call today for more information.
509.664.5324
[email protected]
NMLS # 500247

Thanks,
Darel Ansley

11/30/2022

Protect yourself.

When I was younger, the future seemed far away, and I thought I was bulletproof; nothing bad would happen. The benefit of being older is that I have seen how time plays into this equation. When you are young, if you only have a 10% chance of being in a car accident each year, you are convinced that there is a 90% chance you won’t. Once 40 years have gone by, you realize that the 10% chance means you likely had 4 accidents in 40 years. This has given me the perspective that bad things can happen, but the good news is, there are insurance products to cover almost anything.

My grandfather was an insurance underwriter, but when he passed away, my grandmother found that he had no life insurance! A bad mistake that certainly could have been avoided. The point of this writing is that you take some time to look ahead. Your life is likely vastly different than the last time you thought about insurance, so I recommend taking a few minutes to think through some negative events that might happen, and then check to see if you are covered. I am not an insurance agent, so these ideas come from a consumer’s perspective.

We live in wildfire country, so I wrote last year about checking the replacement cost of your house to make sure you have enough to rebuild it in the event of a total loss. Here are some other things to think about:

One of the impacts of wildfire is that the scarred land does not retain water, so until the foliage grows back, a downpour can result in mudslides and flooding. A standard homeowner’s policy does not protect against these events.

If you passed away suddenly and your income stream stopped, who would be affected? If I add up paying off my house, replacing my wife’s car every so often, and carrying her to the end of her life, that’s a big number. Now how about factoring for inflation? What else does your current income go to that should continue after you pass?

What if my daughter or her husband passed away? One of them alone cannot care for 4 kids, so that would fall to us. Maybe I need to make sure they both have life insurance funded. Fortunately, because the odds of a younger person dying is low, that’s not very expensive.

I have a friend who lost a child; of course, their whole world stopped, so it was a blessing to have a $25,000 policy to cover the service and regular life expenses while nobody went to work.

If your 2-year-old car is totaled, does your coverage allow you to replace it with the same model/ year at todays used-car prices? You might talk to your agent about a new car replacement endorsement. Also, car repair has the double whammy of fewer people in the industry, and terrible supply chain issues. Your car might need repair after an accident, but instead of being done in a week, it might be a month or more. You might want to increase your rental reimbursement coverage, as you might be driving a rental for longer than you think. The math tends to work out on this endorsement if you use it for a week over the next 10 years. You saved more money than the added premium cost you.

There are so many insurance companies out there all with different products and policies, so I highly recommend you find a local insurance agent who has taken the courses and understands their products.

You might save a little using 1-800, but I prefer the advice I can get from someone I know and trust. Plus, if I have a policy question, I don’t want to be pressing option 2 on my keypad.

As always, I am trying to offer advice and suggestions for your entire financial well-being. I hope you find this useful. Feel free to pass this information along to others. If you know anyone with Real Estate financing questions, I am always open to discuss scenarios.

11/23/2022

Homegrown Thanksgiving! I raised these Turkeys this summer. Freezer weight of 38 and 23 pounds-not bad for 5 months.
Raising your own food is easier than you think. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

09/20/2022

Buying land to build in Eastern Washington?
Stick with a lender FROM Eastern Washington.

Peoples Bank is a 100 year old Washington Bank.
Contact me for land or construction financing in Eastern Washington.

509-664-5324
[email protected]

09/06/2022

Real Estate Planning

Many of us simply bought a house just because we needed a place to live. But with the incredible growth in housing prices, our homes have become valuable assets. Most of us have gained considerable equity (the difference between the home’s value and the amount we owe). There are numerous lending products that allow us to access that equity without selling our house. Here are some ideas:

1) Obtain a Home Equity Loan or Home Equity Line Of Credit (HELOC) to borrow against the home, and then use those funds as the down payment on another house. Then either the existing home or the new home could be rented out. This allows you to convert equity into cashflow. If you borrow $100,000 against your home and put $100,000 cash down on a new one, your total real estate equity hasn’t changed, its just now in two homes instead of one.

2) If your property is large enough to short-plat, you could create a new lot to sell, or build a rental for income, or gift/sell to your kids so they can build their first home.

3) Obtain a HELOC and use the funds to improve your house. If you borrowed $50,000 and used it for improvements that made your house worth $75,000 more, you have used equity to build more equity.

4) Use a HELOC or renovation loan to build an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) on your property. In many areas, zoning allows you to add a small residence on your property that could produce rental income. I have talked to enterprising young people who planned to move into the ADU and rent out the main house and effectively take their housing expense to zero because the rent covered all monthly expenses.

5) Obtain a HELOC to gift to kids to help them buy their first home. With housing prices today, most young people are going to need help. These are just a few ideas I have helped clients navigate. Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss a scenario for yourself.

07/20/2022

Credit scores are supposed to evaluate how reliable you are at paying your bills, allowing lenders to charge higher interest rates for people with lower scores, but it’s not a perfect system. Some people have a low credit score without ever being late on a payment.

I had a client a few years ago that earned $500,000 a year, had money in the bank, and no history of late payments, but I couldn’t get him a mortgage because of his low credit score.

The algorithm used to calculate credit scores is proprietary, so we don’t know exactly how it works, but we have some good ideas about what affects it besides late payments.

My client had apparently done two things that the algorithm didn’t like. First, he was constantly opening new credit cards that offered zero percent interest and would transfer the balance from the old card and close it out. It wasn’t the balance that hurt him, it was the closing of the accounts. Length of established credit is important, and he had no open accounts more than 2 years old. He was in his 40’s, but the algorithm was treating him like a 20-year-old.

Then he had bought 3 cars for his business in the last 6 months. For each one, the dealership had shopped around with 3 or 4 lenders to find him the best deal, so he had 10 credit inquiries in a short period of time. When you have a credit inquiry, the algorithm apparently thinks each could be new debt you are taking on. So you can imagine that it may have viewed him as a 20 year old with 10 new credit cards. The credit bureaus don’t know your income or bank balances, so they don’t have the whole picture.

My client viewed himself as a savvy consumer; he could borrow money at zero interest by flipping credit cards, and he shopped around to get the absolute best deal on car financing, but it cost him the ability to finance the new home purchase.

Regarding closing old accounts, its fine to close out extra accounts you don’t use, but to keep your credit score up, keep an old account open to preserve the long-established credit history.

Another thing that the algorithm looks at is credit utilization, or the percentage of your balance to your credit limit. You probably pay off your credit cards in full each month, but your score can still be affected. The credit card company updates the credit bureaus with the balance on your last bill before you paid it. So if you run $5000 a month of your household expenses through your credit card to get those airline points, and your credit limit is $7500, you are over the 20% utilization that the algorithm likes to see. To fix this, you could just ask the credit card company to increase your limit to $20,000. (but don’t use this extra borrowing capacity to go into debt).

Because length of credit is important for your score and the resulting cost of borrowing, I started building my kids’ credit scores while they were still teenagers. I opened a no annual fee card jointly with each of them. I did not give them a card to use, but each month I would spend $10-$15 and pay it off. Not only did they have a good history of paying bills on time, but by the time they were in their 20’s, they had 5+ years of credit history. The idea being that it cost me nothing, but by the time they needed to finance something, they could get a lower interest rate because of the better credit score.

If you ever want to see what is actually on your credit report, you can do that for free once a year. Go to www.annualcreditreport.com. Just skip past the options to pay for your credit score and just make sure that the data they are storing is accurate. If you see any issues, they offer easy ways to dispute any incorrect information. Feel free to contact me for any questions on real estate financing.

If you know of anyone else who would find this information helpful, please share this post, invite them to like my page, or tag them in the comments.

Feel free to contact me for any questions on real estate financing.

04/27/2022

People have been asking how the current major events will affect their real estate assets and mortgage rates. It was finally looking like we were emerging from the Covid era, when BAM, we got hit with:
War
Inflation
Rising fuel prices
The Federal Reserve (FED) raising rates
Supply Disruptions

While nobody knows how all these things will work out, I can give you a few general thoughts:
Everyone has their own inflation rate based on what we spend our money on. Groceries and gas may be up huge percentages, but your mortgage payment won’t change, so that portion of your budget is inflation proof (taxes and insurance might move, but not the P/I portion).
If you are concerned about hyperinflation like 1920’s Germany, people with mortgages actually benefited. Let’s say they owed 10,000 Marks on their mortgage and were earning 250 Marks a month. Because the money was devalued so drastically, the same person was soon being paid 25,000 marks a month and could pay off their house in 2 weeks. I don’t think we will see hyperinflation in the US, but you get the idea.
In our market of North Central Washington, I expect home values to continue to rise. There is just a shortage of homes for sale, and lots of people who want to move to our area. Now that many people can work from anywhere, they are choosing to leave the cities and move to this part of the state. With demand exceeding supply, home prices continue to be pushed up. In our small market area, we don’t have national homebuilders putting up 1000 homes at a time, so it will be many years before the supply of homes ever catches up to the demand.
Supply disruptions and fuel prices are certainly making it more expensive to build right now. My belief is that lumber mills and manufacturers of flooring, cabinets, and other components will eventually ramp up production to cash in on these high prices and we will soon have an over-supply, and construction costs will come down. I just can’t tell you if that will take 6 months or 3 years.
What about mortgage rates? Yes, they are up from the Covid levels, but they are still at historic lows.

How high can they get? I can’t see them getting much higher, because if rates hit the 6’s (although still historically low) that implies that the government would be paying out 4%+ on the 10-year money they borrow. Higher rates bring higher payments therefore with the Government's outstanding debt load being as high as it is they may be forced to push this back down, which in turn could reflect in lower mortgage rates.
This year I want to send out some more valuable information. I don’t want to overwhelm anyone, so it's just going to be 3 times this year. These are the topics I plan to cover:

Real Estate Planning
Ways to use real estate equity to create wealth or help the next generation
Credit Scores
How they work, ways to improve scores
How you can help kids or grandkids improve their credit scores long before they need to buy a house
Risk Management
Ideas about protecting your income and assets through insurance products (from someone who doesn’t sell insurance)


If you know of anyone else who would find this information helpful, please share this post, invite them to like my page, or tag them in the comments.

As always, I am available to answer any of your Real Estate financing questions.

04/05/2021

With few houses available, many people throughout Eastern Washington are having to buy land and build to get what they want. We make the land and construction financing simple. Keep it local - I have been serving Eastern Washington clients for 16+ years. We also offer Owner-Builder financing. www.peoplesbank-wa.com/darel/

09/11/2020

Are you working from home, wishing you had your own home office? Consider a home refinance to finance your home office renovations! Send me a message if you'd like to discuss loan options.