Mortgage Insurance

Mortgage Insurance

A lender may require you to take out life insurance to pay off your mortgage should you die. You can also get insurance to protect your income or just your mortgage payments if you become ill or disabled, or lose your job.
Sometimes, however, the unexpected happens. For example, you might lose your job through redundancy, or find yourself unable to work due to long–term sickness. By law, an employer must pay most employees statutory sick pay for up to 28 weeks though this will probably be a lot less than full earnings. After that, you would probably have to fall back on State benefits. These are limited and means-tested which may mean you won’t qualify. If you are self-employed, you have no employer to help, so you would have to turn to the State.
This is when insurance to protect you or your family’s income or borrowing can be useful.
Mortgage insurance protects the lender against loss in the event that the borrower defaults. The borrower pays the premium, but the lender receives the protection.The sole benefit received by the borrower is that, with mortgage insurance, lenders are willing to make loans with down payments smaller than 20% of purchase price or appraised value

Mortgage payment protection:

A typical policy will start to pay your mortgage repayments one month after your income stops due to redundancy, accident or illness, and continues to pay for 12 months.

Lenders mortgage insurance

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lenders mortgage insurance (LMI), also known as private mortgage insurance (PMI), is insurance payable to a lender that may be required when taking out a mortgage loan. It is an insurance in the case that the mortgagor is not able to repay the loan, and the lender is not able to recover its costs after foreclosing the loan and selling the mortgaged property. The annual cost of PMI varies between 0.19% and 0.9% of the total loan value, depending on the loan term, loan type and proportion of the total home value that is financed.

The LMI may be payable up front, or it may be capitalized onto the loan. This type of insurance is usually only required if the downpayment is less than 20% of the sales price or appraised value (in other words, if the loan-to-value ratio (LTV) is 80% or more). Once the principal is reduced to 80% of value, the LMI is no longer required. This can occur via the principal being paid down, via home value appreciation, or both. Cancelling mortgage insurance can be a difficult process. Sometimes lenders will require that LMI be paid for a fixed period (for example, 2 or 3 years), even if the principal reaches 80% sooner than that. The cancellation request must come from the Servicer of the mortgage to the PMI company who issued the insurance. Often the Servicer will require a new appraisal to determine the LTV. The cost of mortgage insurance varies considerably based on several factors which include: loan amount, LTV, occupancy (primary, second home, investment property), documentation provided at loan origination, and most of all, credit score.

If a borrower has less than the 20% downpayment needed to avoid a mortgage insurance requirement, they might be able to make use of a second mortgage (sometimes referred to as a “piggy-back loan”) to make up the difference. Two popular versions of this lending technique are the so-called 80/10/10 and 80/15/5 arrangements. Both involve obtaining a primary mortgage for 80% LTV. An 80/10/10 program uses a 10% LTV second mortgage with a 10% downpayment, and an 80/15/5 program uses a 15% LTV second mortgage with a 5% downpayment. Other combinations of second mortgage and downpayment amounts might also be available. One advantage of using these arrangements is that under United States tax law, mortgage interest payments may be deductible on the borrower’s income taxes, whereas mortgage insurance premiums were not until 2007.

Mortgage insurance

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mortgage Life Insurance refers to an insurance policy that guarantees repayment of a mortgage loan in the event of death or, possibly, disability of the mortgagor. Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI) refers to protection for the lender in the event of default, usually covering a portion of the amount borrowed. There are Government loan products that also include a Mortgage Insurance Premium (MIP), essentially the government equivalent of PMI.

For example, Mr. Smith obtains a mortgage loan that exceeds 80% (the typical cut-off) of his home ’s or property’s value and/or sale price. Because of his limited equity, the lender requires that Mr. Smith pay for mortgage insurance that protects their institution against his default. To obtain a mortgage loan insured by the Federal Housing Administration, Mr. Smith must pay a mortgage insurance premium (MIP) equal to 1.5 percent of the loan amount at closing. This premium is normally financed by the lender and paid to FHA on the borrower’s behalf. Depending on the loan-to-value ratio, there may be a monthly premium as well.