A New Choice for Home Financing: Correspondent Lenders

When you begin your search for a new home loan, one of the first things to consider is where you'll get the money. Your basic choices will be mortgage brokers and banks.

Your first instinct may be to go with your local bank, who you know from doing business with them for other things, such as your checking and saving accounts. But you've probably also heard that mortgage brokers can get you a better interest rate, since they deal with hundreds of lending sources. It can be confusing, but there’s a third source of funding that combines the best of both--the correspondent lender.

In order to understand the differences, let’s look at how the lending process works in each case. Mortgage bankers are given rate sheets by their institutions, telling them what interest rates they can quote to their clients on any given day. There’s only so much a bank can do, with regard to interest rates, because it needs to remain profitable in order to stay in business.

Mortgage brokers have an advantage in that regard. They're not loaning their own money, and are free to "shop your loan around," looking for the best terms from various lending sources. They make their money by getting loans at discount prices and then marking them up, making money on the difference. Since they have many sources to choose from, they can often find loans at lower rates than most banks.

The third alternative, correspondent lenders, combines the best features from both groups. Correspondent lenders are similar to mortgage bankers in that they make the lending decision and fund the loan with their own money or credit line. However, as soon as a loan has closed, it’s sold to another lender at a previously negotiated price. It’s the best of both worlds for you as a borrower. You'll be dealing with the banker who is funding your loan, yet that banker is able to shop your mortgage around, which can obtain you a lower interest rate.

Correspondent lenders can sometimes be difficult to find, since they're generally smaller institutions, operating on a regional basis, and it can be hard to tell whether a lender is a broker or a banker, based solely on the company’s name. One way to find out is by visiting the lender’s website, if they have one. You'll normally find a button you can click that will bring up a page containing a detailed description of the company. If the lender doesn't have a website, you may find their phone number in the Yellow Pages.

Although they may not always be easy to locate, with a little digging, you may find that a correspondent lender offers an attractive alternative to a banker or mortgage broker when it comes to shopping for your next home loan.

Are Biweekly Mortgages Really Worthwhile?

You may have heard people, especially mortgage lenders, extolling the virtues of biweekly payments, saying that you can save thousands of dollars and take 5-7 years off your mortgage--and then offering to set up a biweekly plan for you for as little as $400. But you don't have to spend $400 to begin saving money and time on your mortgage. In fact, you don't have to spend anything at all! You can set up a money-saving mortgage payment plan yourself--easily and at no extra cost.

The key is to look carefully at the fine print in many biweekly plans. You find that even though you'd be making biweekly payments, the lender may only post them to your account on a monthly basis, which means that you wouldn't be saving anything on interest, because mortgage interest is paid in arrears (as opposed to rent payments, which are paid in advance). Your only real savings would be in the fact that you'd be making the equivalent of one extra payment a year. That’s a good thing, of course, but you don't need to pay someone $400-500, possible monthly maintenance fees, to be able to accomplish the same results.

Here’s how biweekly payments save time and money: By making biweekly payments, you actually end up making an extra monthly payment each year. Over the course of a year, you'd make 26 payments (one every other week for 52 weeks), which is the same as making 13 monthly payments. Making one extra payment per year will shorten the life of your loan and save you thousands of dollars.

But you don't have to make biweekly payments to obtain those savings. Here are a couple examples of how you can save big money, using the same basic idea:

If you get paid every two weeks, divide your monthly principal and interest payment in half and then send your lender a check for that amount during those months in which you receive three paychecks. Just sending in those two extra checks will be the equivalent of one extra payment a year.

If you don't want to send lump checks, you can get the same results by dividing your monthly principal and interest payment by twelve and then adding that extra amount to your payment every month. Normally, that figure won't put too much extra strain on your budget, and it will add an extra mortgage payment to your loan every year.

You really can save significant amounts of money and shorten the life of your loan by making extra payments, but you definitely don't have to pay a lender $400-500 to do it. Making those extra payments is easy to do yourself, and at no extra charge--which is always a good thing.