Are you looking to purchase a home today, but wish you could have gotten a lower rate on your loan? Well, what if I were to tell you that even though market rates today are hovering around 7%, you can still purchase a home with a 3.5% interest rate or even lower intrigued? Stick around as I go through how that's a very real possibility for today's buyers. I want to quickly answer these top four questions I get asked all the time. Listen for the details and how an assumable loan can benefit buyers and sellers.

What is an assumable loan?

Is the contract written differently?

How do you know a house has an assumable loan and how do you find them?

And then how do you actually acquire it?

Example:

If I'm a buyer and I bought a house 10 years ago, and at that time I bought that house for $300,000, I put no money down, I got a VA loan and I got a fantastic interest rate. Whatever that rate was, we'll call it 3%. So I got a $300,000 loan, a 3% with a VA loan, no money down. Now, fast forward 10 years. Now I'm a seller, and as a seller, I have a loan and I want to sell that home for $500,000. And I had this original loan at $300,000. I paid it down for the last 10 years. So maybe today it has a balance of $250,000. That $250,000 still has an interest rate tied to it at 3%, and I still have 20 years left on my loan. As a seller, I then have the option to market an assumable loan, meaning a buyer has the option to purchase my home, keeping that loan intact.

Now, if I want to sell that home for $500,000 and my loan is $250,000, that implies that the buyer has to either get a loan for the difference, has to have the cash for the difference, and that's something that we're going to talk about when we talk about how to acquire the loan. But the basics of an assumable loan is the terms around that loan stay in place. They simply get transferred from the current seller to the new would-be buyer.

The cost of borrowing of a business, borrowing funds is still going up trying to slow down the spending that Americans and businesses are doing to inflict pain, right? We talked about this, that the Fed is trying to inflict pain. The Fed is trying to slow the roll to just slow down demand, slow down buying and allow supply chains to catch back up again.

The cost of everything is just not going to drop like a rock, but it's going to slowly get there where the cost of the things that we experience at the gas station, at the grocery store are going to start coming back to Earth, right? So let me point out a couple things.

So the cost of shipping; shippers have already said that they expect to realize a benefit in lower costs early 2023. So we're seeing these indexes that some of the things that's costing them, like the cost of gas is less? Some of their expenses are less. They're expecting that cost to then be passed on to the wholesalers, which will be measured in the PPI early 2023. Again, nothing happens overnight, but check out this drop. We saw 4.9% drop month-over-month, which dropped the annual percentage from 21% in September to 11% in October. Now that's a big drop given where we had been because we had seen it much higher than that, even upwards of 21%. So to see that kind of annual growth coming down tells you that the shippers are going to start passing on lower costs to the producers and the wholesalers and those wholesalers.

We saw the PPI came out this morning and it dropped from an 8.4% annualized to an 8% annualized. It was expected to come out at 8.3%. The month-over-month was only 0.2% and that was expected to be 0.4%. So all of that is showing that the annual is coming down because the month-over-month increase is slowing down. So the shipping is costing a little bit less. The cost of shipping, of getting the products from the ports to the fact or to the warehouses. That shipping cost is costing less. The wholesalers, their cost of goods, their cost of acquiring that product to then turn into the consumer based product. So that wholesale price is coming down. We saw on Thursday's report, the CPI came down, it was expected to have a month over month of double what it actually had.

The value and the equity that we have in our homes is abundant, even if it comes down slightly based on our expectation of our equity over the last two years.

We are still strong in equity. We're strong in savings. Many of us, many us still have jobs. There's still job openings. GDP is expected to be positive this fourth quarter, which says that the economy is still churning and people are still buying all of these things way towards a strong economy, which is where I'm going to land. This plane also lands to a very strong real estate market.

Listen to this full episode. The summary is That's it. That's what it comes down to is the balance of supply and demand.

Let's walk through how you can actually buy down your interest rate! You can save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars by buying down your interest rate. But, there are some limitations to how much seller concessions you can receive, based on your loan and down payment. Let's also walk through the numbers of buying down your interest rate.

Today we're talking about a permanent buy down or really even any kind of seller concession and a limitation on the amount that you can get in order to buy that rate down. For conventional loans, whether you're buying it as a primary home or a second home, we're going talk about investments. With a primary home or second home, it depends on how much money you're putting down. So when you are putting down less, you can get less of a seller credit to help give you that rate. Buy down advantage. Let's talk through some of those numbers.

Listen to this 5 minute episode of The Double Comma Club, "Can I Buy Down My Interest Rate?"

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