vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
As a new graduate, aside from the fact that you seem to have the extra $193/mo to pay more towards your loan, we don't know anything else.  I wrote a lengthy article on this in response to a friend who had a loan, but was also pondering a home purchase in the future. Student Loans and Your First Mortgage discusses the math behind one's ability to put a downpayment on a house vs having that monthly cash to pay towards the mortgage. In your case, the question is whether, in 5 years, the $8500 would be best spent as a home down payment or to pay off the 6.8% loan.  If you specifically had plans toward home ownership, the timing of that plan would affect my answer here, as I discuss in the article.  The right answer to your question can only come by knowing far more of your personal situation.  Meanwhile, the plan comes at a cost. Your plan will get rid of the loan in about 5 years, but if you simply double up the payments, advising the servicing company to apply the extra to principal, it would drop to just a couple month over over 4. As you read more about personal finance, you'll find a lot of different views. Some people are fixated on having zero debt, others will focus on liquidity. In the end, you need to understand each approach and decide what's right for you.
"Unless you are investing an insignificant amount of money for the home and renovations, you need title insurance.  Without it multiple other parties can claim ownership in this property you are purchasing and investing in.  Also you can know if there are any liens against the property which can cost you a significant amount in addition to the costs you are budgeting.   For example liens against a property I bought a while back amounted to 26% of the price I paid.  In my case the seller (a bank) paid those, while in your case you may need to pay any liens as I suspect the seller has little money. That ""bone"" in your body that has you worried about this transaction is really good.  Pay attention to it."
Do you need to buy car insurance?  If you do, you are buying to open a put option.
Insurance you purchase is paid to you. However, even if the home is destroyed, you still owe all the money to the bank, and you no longer have the house as part of the land's value to guarantee the loan. So depending on how much the land is still worth versus how much you owe -- and exactly what the terms of the loan are -- you may need to use some or all of that money to repay enough of the loan to bring it back within the bank's policies. Read the terms of the loan -- consider asking a lawyer to clarify it for you if necessary; having a lawyer review that kind of major contract is always wise anyway. –
The lender may require that you purchase home insurance with minimum acceptable coverage limits and deductibles. All of these will be paid into escrow accounts, managed by your lending bank, from a single check you send them monthly. I pay all of these, in a state (Texas) that gets its primary income from sales and property tax instead of income, and my monthly payment isn't quite double the simple P&I. Once you have the house, you'll want to fill the house. Nice bed: probably $1500 between mattress and frame for a nice big queen you can stretch out on (and have lady friends over). Nice couch: $1000. TV: call it $500. That's probably the bare minimum you'll want to buy to replace what you lived through college with (you'll have somewhere to eat and sleep other than the floor of your new home), and we're already talking almost a month's salary, or payments of up to 10% of your monthly take-home pay over a year on a couple of store credit cards. Plates, cookware, etc just keeps bumping this up. Yes, they're (theoretically) all one-time costs, but they're things you need, and things you may not have if you've been living in dorms and eating in dining halls all through college. The house you buy now is likely to be a ""starter"", maybe 3bed/2bath and 1600 sqft at the upper end (they sell em as small as 2bd/1bt 1100sqft). It will support a spouse and 2 kids, but by that point you'll be bursting at the seams. What happens if your future spouse had the same idea of buying a house early while rates were low? The cost of buying a house may be as little as 3.5% down and a few hundred more in advance escrow and a couple other fees the seller can't pay for you. The cost of selling the same house is likely to include all the costs you made the seller pay when you bought it, because you'll be selling to someone in the same position you're in now.
You don't have to use an agent (broker, as you call it), but it is strongly advised. In some counties lawyers are required, in some not. Check your local requirements. Similarly the escrow companies that usually deal with recording and disbursing of money. You will probably not be able to get a title insurance without using an escrow service (I'm guessing here, but it makes sense to me). You will not be able to secure financing through a bank or a mortgage broker without an escrow company, and it might be hard without an agent. Agents required by law to know all the details of the process, and they can guide you through what to do and what to look into. They have experience reading and understanding the inspection reports, they know what to demand from the seller (disclosures, information, etc), they know how and from where to get the HOA docs and disclosures, and can help you negotiate the price knowing the market information (comparable sales, comparable listings, list vs sales statistics, etc). It is hard to do all that alone, but if you do - you should definitely get a discount over the market price of the property of about 5% (the agents' fees are up to 5% mostly). I bought several properties in California and in other states, and I wouldn't do it without an agent on my side. But if you trust the other side entirely and willing to take the risk of missing a step and having problems later with title, mortgage, insurance or resale, then you can definitely save some money and do it without an agent, and there are people doing that.
I would not do this personally for most house items, since I really view them as consumables. I am using household items until they wear out, not placing my money in an investment that needs to retain or return value.  If you have any investment-like items, or if the value represents a significant (you decide this) portion of your annual income or net worth, then track it with inventory and schedule it on an insurance policy. If your home is destroyed and you have an inaccurate inventory or no   inventory at all, what does insurance provide for replacement of   property?  Maybe more importantly, will insurance even care about your   own personal inventory? (Isn't it easy to scam, through value   inflation?) For insurance, you need to start with the details of your homeowners policy. Often there will be a general blanket amount of what they will reimburse. If you have items over that amount, or need more coverage, you will need to schedule the items up-front with insurance. This way, the value of expensive items are known and agreed on by all parties before an event. It ensures a quick claim resolution, and it is the cleanest and easiest way to deal with the insurance company.  You need to talk to your agent about the unique aspects of your policy. You need to make sure the policy will cover your liabilities.
My question is, how do you rebuild a home, without the money to rebuild the home? I ignorantly thought that was why we paid for insurance. The reason that you have insurance is so as to keep the mortgage lender from losing money.  That's why you buy the insurance through the mortgage lender and they get paid.  Without the insurance, you'd have no home but still have a mortgage.  You'd either have to pay off a mortgage with no house or have to declare bankruptcy to shed the mortgage.   You essentially have two paths.  If you (or the builder/suppliers) can afford to float the cost, you can rebuild the original house.  You'll eventually get the $161,000 and can pay off the builder and suppliers.  This may involve taking out a construction mortgage to refinance the original mortgage.  Presumably the construction mortgage would be with a different lender.   The other path is that you can sell the existing property as is, and use the insurance and proceeds to pay off the existing mortgage.  Then you'd have no house and no mortgage.  You start over and buy a house with a mortgage.   It's possible that your insurance payoff isn't enough to pursue either path.  Then your option is to get the insurer to make a bigger payoff.  This may involve suing them.  Note that you may be able to talk the government into suing the insurer for you.  They do have regulators who can review things.  If you can't get government action, there are lawyers who will do the suing and take their fees out of their winnings.
"What you need will depend on a number of factors that aren't clear from the question. This coverage is simply called ""Vacant home insurance"", but not all companies are willing to offer this coverage. Unfortunately, in New York, insurers can also legally drop your standard homeowners' coverage if they become aware that your property has become vacant for 30 days or more. The Insurer's Concerns Typically, a ""standard"" homeowners policy will have an exclusion clause for vacant homes. The insurance company's concern is that without someone in the home, they will be at risk for break-ins, squatters and vandalism. If you've ever seen ""Flip Men"" on Spike, you'll know this is a serious concern (great show, by the way). They will use a risk model to calculate an estimated risk for the property (this is why a seasonal vacation home in a sparsely-populated area is often less of a concern than a family home in an urban area). If they estimate the risk to be low, some insurance companies will allow to you buy back that exclusion so that vacant properties are covered. In your case, they have probably decided that either: Your Options First, you need to find a company that is comfortable with taking on the extra risk of a vacant home. This will vary quite a bit by location, but the main ones are Farmer's (they use the Foremost brand name in New York) and Castle Rock. There are lots of insurance agencies that also advertise these products, but most of them are middlemen and use one of these two companies to actually write the coverage. Additionally, since this is a specialty policy, make sure you understand all of the details of the policy, and how they vary from a regular policy including: How to Reduce your Premium costs These are general tips from the Murray Group's website (an independent broker in NY) on how to lower the additional cost of vacant coverage: This may sound expensive, but these steps will all reduce the risk of something really bad happening when you're not there. Additionally, do you know anyone you completely trust (relative, unemployed friend) that might want to live in your old house rent-free for a while?
They all have rules about what type of insurance you must have;  and if you don't have the required insurance,  they will offer to contract one for you.  That's fair enough,  I had to prove to my CU that the insurance I have was up to their standards,  no biggy.  Where it becomes a scam,  is when i) the lender refuses to accept your existing insurance as valid no matter what;  ii) buys an insurance on your behalf without asking/giving you the option of getting your own;  and iii) buys an overpriced insurance (e.g., insurance for the fair market value of your house rather than the cost of rebuilding it...),  likely from themselves  (and possibly iv) uses this as a pretext to foreclose your house).
The point of title insurance is that when you buy a house, it is possible that you may eventually find out that the seller didn't actually own the property - either because they were trying to deceive you, or some transfer of ownership in the past wasn't carried out properly. If that happens you can find yourself with no house, and still owing the mortgager the purchase price. Hardly anybody can afford to take that kind of hit, which is why you need some form of protection against it. The traditional way of doing this was to get a lawyer to do a title search, in which they check that everything in order. However this costs tens of dollars at least to do the work for every sale, and hardly ever finds anything. Title Insurance is a company volunteering to take the hit for you if there turns out to be a problem, in return for a payment of less than the title search would cost. In essence they are saying that it's cheaper to take the risk than do the work. What are the statistics? This report seems to indicate that payout is around 5% of premium, but title insurance is a one-off premium and the payout can theoretically happen many years down the line. However it is almost certain that the insurance companies have done the math and believe that selling this insurance will be profitable for them, so they believe that payouts are going to be substantially less than 100%. Is title insurance worth it for you? If the payout is 5% of premiums, the in a purely statistical sense it is not worth it. You would on average gain more by not taking it. However that is true of almost all insurance. The policy is there to protect you in the unlikely but not impossible event where you would otherwise lose a huge amount of money. Unless you can afford to lose the value of your house, you need some form of protection. We've already seen that the only other form of protection is a title search, and they cost more. The other issue is that if you are taking a mortgage, your mortgager will absolutely insist that you have either a title search or title insurance. There is no other way - and title insurance is the cheaper of the two. In this case it is best to look on the title insurance as simply a cost of doing business. It's irrelevant whether it's worth it or not - you can't do the transaction without it.
Actually, most insurance policies DON'T have a cash value if you don't make a claim.  The reason that some life insurance policies do this is that they are really tax sheltered investments posing as insurance.  With that in mind, the root of your question is really whether insurance premiums are wasted if you never make a claim. It really makes no difference if you are talking about EI, Auto, or Homeowner's insurance. My answer to that is no. What you are paying for when you buy insurance is financial risk avoidance. Look at it this way, you don't buy EI as an investment where you hope to get a return on your investment. You are buying the right to be protected against catastrophic financial difficulty associated with losing your job. Whether you claim it or not you did receive that protection. This is what drives me so crazy when I hear people talk about how an insurance company is ripping you off because you paid more in premiums than they paid out in benefits. Of course you did! If most people didn't pay in more than the company paid out there would be no financial interest for someone to form an insurance company.
The short answer is: the money is yours from the insurance company, they actually can't tell you how to spend it, they can only decide from their tables and your plan, how much you get. The longer answer: Usually the insurance company pays one blanket amount, then itemizes the rest, where you have to submit receipts.  You're also lucky, because damage over time is rarely covered, damage is usually only covered as sudden damage, so they don't pay out for maintenance issues. You can repair your house the way you want, I even do some of my own labor, because some repair jobs just don't get covered what they really cost to do right.   HOWEVER, your mortgage company can withhold part of your claim to verify satisfactory work, this is to maintain the value of the collateral, and the insurance company can choose not to cover pre existing damage.  Generally they don't stray from the assessment.   I do not know of any law that permits an internal inspection of your home without your consent.  They can come look at the outside, but they can't force you to let them inspect inside... Unless they're holding some of your insurance payment hostage, for most banks, receipts are sufficient. A good contractor usually will meet all the needs with an itemized budget and has a bit of wiggle room to fix things the right way, while keeping the bank and mortgage company happy.
Yes you can. Buy to let mortgages are typically lent on a combination of expected rental income, plus a part of the applicants other income. They also (at the moment) usually require a fairly hefty deposit.  The exact requirements are likely to have changed by the time you apply, but in basic, yes. There is another option. You can increase your mortgage on your currently property, and buy the BTL with cash. This gives some more flexibility, as you can move faster, so is great for an auction purchase. It is also often cheaper to mortgage your main property, and you will get a lower rate. Of course, to do this you will need sufficient equity in your main property, and income to cover the mortgage repayments, so the practicality of this depends on your main property value and the amount you need.
When I bought the house I had my lawyer educate me about everything on the forms that seemed at all unclear, since this was my first time thru the process. On of the pieces of advice that he gave was that title insurance had almost no value in this state unless you had reason to believe the title might be defective but wanted to buy the property anyway. In fact I did get it anyway, as an impulse purchase -- but I'm fully aware that it was a bad bet. Especially since I had the savings to be able to self-insure, which is always the better answer if you can afford to risk the worst case scenario. Also: Ask the seller whether they bought title insurance. Often, it is transferrable at least once.
The reason people buy earthquake insurance is not because normal insurance goes straight to the lender (it does not) but because oftentimes earthquake damage is not covered under normal homeowner's insurance. Natural disasters are often not covered under regular insurance. This is why people buy flood insurance. If your pipes burst and flood your house, your home owner's insurance will typically cover. If the local river floods and floods your house, oftentimes insurance will not cover. This is why a lot of state/federal agencies have separate pools of insurance. All earthquake insurance in California is technically through the state agency, though you may go through your homeowner provider to get it. I pay $200 a year for mine, I wouldn't say it's very expensive. My concern is not a giant earthquake that destroys my house. My concern is a large earthquake that might cause cracks in my slab or structural damage that my regular insurance is in no way obligated to cover but I need to fix. I think if you live in an earthquake prone area it's as reasonable as getting flood insurance if you live in an area known to flood.
(Disclosure - I am a real estate agent, involved with houses to buy/sell, but much activity in rentals) I got a call from a man and his wife looking for an apartment. He introduced itself, described what they were looking for, and then suggested I google his name. He said I'd find that a few weeks back, his house burned to the ground and he had no insurance. He didn't have enough savings to rebuild, and besides needing an apartment, had a building lot to sell.  Insurance against theft may not be at the top of your list. Don't keep any cash, and keep your possessions to a minimum. But a house needs insurance for a bank to give you a mortgage. Once paid off, you have no legal obligation, but are playing a dangerous game. You are right, it's an odds game. If the cost of insurance is .5% the house value and the chance of it burning down is 1 in 300 (I made this up) you are simply betting it won't be yours that burns down.  Given that for most people, a paid off house is their largest asset, more value that all other savings combined, it's a risk most would prefer not to take.  Life insurance is a different matter. A person with no dependents has no need for insurance. For those who are married (or have a loved one), or for parents, insurance is intended to help survivors bridge the gap for that lost income. The 10-20 times income value for insurance is just a recommendation, whose need fades away as one approaches independence. I don't believe in insurance as an investment vehicle, so this answer is talking strictly term.
The bank doesn't have to do anything. It is your responsibility to provide the proof of insurance. It is the agent's job, which you through your HOA dues paid for, to provide that proof to you. You shouldn't be registering with icerts. They say so in the first sentence on the registration page: Unit Owners, Do Not Register Here! If you own an existing property,   and have received a letter from your lender requiring an annual   renewal/updated certificate for an association that has recently   expired, please forward that letter to info@iCerts.com to receive   instructions to place your order. If your request is a new loan of any   kind, please contact your lender and request that they either contact   us to place this order, or register below. So you can try that route (sending an email to info@icerts.com), and see if it works. It does cost money, in the range of $20-$100 (I used a different similar service at the time and they charged $75 for this). If it doesn't, you can try and work with the insurance agent. There are some ways to persuade them: California has very strong traditions of consumer protections. In this case, I suggest checking out this site. Let the insurance agent know that as the HOA member - they're working for you, and that in the next HOA meeting you will raise a request to change the insurance agency. Also, remind the agent that the CA Insurance Commission will knock on their doors to ask why they don't provide you with the proof you need. If the HOA management company doesn't help you, you can remind them that they too can be fired. This can be done, and isn't even all that hard. There's a lot of competition in the HOA management market, and it wouldn't be too hard to find a new management company. The HOA management company should have provided you the proof of coverage when they renewed the policy.
How are home insurance companies going to pay for all the damage from the hurricanes? Are Allstate/Farmers/Etc. required to keep enough money liquid to pay 100+ billion in claims? Google results are  littered with angry articles related to healthcare companies, I'm struggling to find a legitimate answer on home insurance.
Private Mortgage Insurance. It's money that you pay to an insurance company to make the lender whole in the event that you go into default. It's a real waste of money for you. If you are trying to finance more than 80% of the value of a home, a standard mortage is likely to require that you get PMI. Nowadays there are other options which involve paying substantially more interest.