Get the Best Current Mortgage Rates in Omaha: Compare & Save Today!

Omaha, Nebraska, is a housing market between trends.

Homes in this metro area can be purchased for well below the national median value, meaning if you’re looking for an affordable place to lay down roots–or if you’re interested in seeking a larger home than would be available in a costlier area–you’re in luck.

According to the most recent Zillow assessment of Omaha trends, the median home in the area is worth $171,600 while the median price of listed homes is $215,000 – $178,000 for houses that have sold.

The national median, according to the Census Bureau, is $302,400, far above any of the measures for Omaha. Recent times have seen the price of homes in Omaha spike, with Zillow recording a 7.4 percent growth over 12 months.

With that said, the market appears to have peaked, with prices predicted to fall 1.3 percent over the coming year.

Trulia’s market trends report noted that Omaha’s median rent price has fallen to the same level it had reached a year ago, after plateauing in the summer months.

The price per square foot of a home has risen 6 percent year-over-year, and the median sales price according to this market watcher is $180,000.

These numbers tell the same story as Zillow’s data: If you’re looking for a market that is considerably more affordable than the national norm, Omaha is ready to welcome you.

When it’s time to settle down in a new home or take advantage of favorable market conditions, you’ll need to find a lender. You should also remember that this process is directed and shaped by many factors beyond local market conditions.

Current Mortgage and Refinancing Rates in Omaha

4 Critical Elements that Affect Mortgage Rate & Refinance Rates in Omaha

When you’re inspecting the housing market in Omaha, considering your next purchase or refinance, there are factors to focus on that go beyond price trends and availability. Often, it is a combination of your financial history and decisions that determine available to you.

Lenders base their mortgage rates on different factors. Shopping around and looking for companies that offer options tailored to your needs could be your best bet for finding an ideal mortgage, one that will help fund your dream home in Omaha.

From your credit history and score to your status as a veteran, retiree, or government employee, your details may make you eligible for a favorable home loan. Understanding some of the most relevant factors that affect mortgage rates can boost your decision-making ability.

The following are four prime considerations when applying for a home loan:

Debt-to-income ratio

Mortgage lenders are more likely to give you a favorable interest rate on your home loan if they’re sure you’ll be able to pay back what you borrow. One of the most important measures of financial stability is your debt-to-income ratio.

You arrive at this figure by dividing your debt payments for one month by your earnings for the same period. If only a small portion of your salary is going to repayments, lenders may give you favorable conditions.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau noted that 43 percent is a magic number: This is typically the highest debt-to-income ratio you can have if you want a Qualified Mortgage, a primary type of low-risk loan.

Size of home and amount of loan

There is a standard loan amount for each county, applying for a larger loan is possible, but the mortgage is will then qualify as a “jumbo” loan. The interest rates and available terms for jumbo loan products tend to differ from smaller mortgages, but this doesn’t mean you should rule them out.

The Home Buying Institute pointed out that over several years, market trends began to favor jumbo loans, with these high-value products being offered at lower rates than their smaller counterparts. The overall loan value is one of many factors to weigh when comparing monthly pricing, and the results may be surprising.

Down payment amount

One major determinant in loan pricing and terms is how much money you’re willing and able to pay upfront. Making a larger down payment shows lenders that you’re capable of taking on more financial responsibility, thus reducing the risk in lending. This may lead to low-interest rates and more favorable terms.

The Home Buying Institute pointed out that lenders often assess costs based on risk, and the security implied by a low down payment may cause them to lower rates. Furthermore, loans with 20 percent or higher down payments tend to be exempt from mortgage insurance.

While the down payment amount is often a significant metric, every loan is different. , for instance, may come with no down payment or mortgage insurance requirements.

FICO credit score

There is more than one kind of credit score, making the concept of a generic “credit score” problematic. With that said, the CFPB offered a reminder that FICO is the most used score among mortgage lenders, and thus the number to be most conscious of. Three major agencies assess credit scores.

Instead of just using one, lenders will likely consult all three and select the middle result, according to the CFPB. To keep your score high and therefore reassure financial institutions of your creditworthiness, you can take steps like minimizing your debt, increasing your savings, and refraining from taking out new lines of credit you may not be able to repay.

How to Get the Best Mortgage & Refinancing Rates in Omaha

When it’s time to apply for a home loan in Omaha, you should remember that lenders will offer you different rates and terms, even within the same region.

There are numerous lenders in every city around the nation ready to provide competitive mortgage rates, and Omaha is no different. You should, therefore, shop around for favorable terms and pricing instead of limiting your search to products offered by a single lender.

Beyond shopping around, you can negotiate with lenders to receive terms and rates that favor you, and this is true whether you are buying a new home or refinancing your current mortgage.

As RefiGuide points out, there is when it comes to the costs associated with refinancing a loan. In some cases, you can reduce origination, document preparation, and title search fees if you take the time to negotiate.

While exercising all options is an important way to receive favorable terms on your purchase or refinance loan in Omaha, not all loan applicants perform these steps.

The CFPB points out that it’s common for borrowers to only apply with one lender. Seventy-seven percent of individuals in the association’s data only filed paperwork with one mortgage provider, and nearly half of individuals never even considered more than one lender.

Recommended Companies in Omaha

When shopping around for mortgages in Omaha, you can choose from a huge selection of reputable and established lenders. These companies consist of large-scale national operators, local banks, and credit unions.

The following are a few options to get you started on your search for ideal terms, options, and interest rates.

• NBKC Bank: This financial institution offers home loans around the country. The bank allows customers to check predicted rates online and provides a library of lending resources with useful NBKC Bank foregrounds its VA loan offerings, making it a potential match if you’re eligible for veteran’s benefits.
• New American Funding: New American Funding is another large lender with a scope that spans the whole country. The company has grown from a 40-person business in 2003 into an industry force today.
• J.G. Wentworth: This lender focuses on its ability to offer low-interest rates to its borrowers and has loaned $10 billion in the years since its founding in 1992. The bank offers multiple purchase and refinance options.
• CrossCountry Mortgage: Another recently-founded nationwide lender, CrossCountry focuses its promotion on its ability to provide close and attentive customer service. The company was established in Ohio and has spread to new states over the past 15-plus years.

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Stocks Plunge Again: Are Economic Warning Signs Pointing to Recession?

Economists and investors are concerned that the government bond market is sending a warning signal that the economy could fall into a recession. 

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Here’s How to Easily Wipe out Old Debt and Improve Your Credit Score

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You’ve been working hard to clean up your credit and to improve your score, but we get it: This often feels like a daunting undertaking, especially if you owe creditors money.

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How to Erase Debt Accounts and Increase Your Credit Score

The free credit repair service helps you clean up your overdue accounts so you can bring up your credit score — and rid yourself of those pesky calls.

Heck, you won’t even have to make a single call; Collection Shield 360 does everything for you. It sends disputes to collectors on your behalf to help remove unfair or unverifiable collection accounts from your credit report.

And its track record speaks for itself: Collection Shield 360 has fought to get more than 400,000 collection accounts deleted from users’ credit reports. And most folks see a credit score increase anywhere from 30 to 120 points.

The service helped 31-year-old server Tabatha Pankop deal with lingering bills from T-Mobile, Bright House Networks and Verizon. Her credit score jumped up nearly 200 points, enabling her to move into a better apartment and start looking for a townhouse to buy.

You can use your own copies of your credit reports and enter the information manually for Collection Shield 360 to work with (totally free). Or you can choose the automated process, which includes monthly updates of your credit reports and scores with a premium membership ($1 for a two-month trial).

It takes three steps to get started with Collection Shield 360 — and could bump your score up hundreds of points and finally get those collectors off your back.

This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.

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Our True Taxes

[T]he taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly; and from these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an abatement.
– Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth

There are some topics I don’t often delve into on The Simple Dollar, and taxes are one of them.

Yes, almost all of us pay a lot in taxes. We pay income tax each year to the federal government, sometimes to state governments, and occasionally to local governments. We pay property taxes. We pay sales taxes. We’re sometimes hit with other taxes as well, like usage taxes.

When you add up all of those taxes, it seems like a big financial burden. At the same time, there are strategies you can use to cut into that burden.

So, why aren’t taxes a frequent topic on The Simple Dollar?

The reason is this: there are really only a handful of tax strategies that consistently work for people who aren’t exorbitantly wealthy and already have tax specialists working for them on issues that don’t matter to most Americans. I do talk about those strategies, and often. If you’re saving for your kid’s education, use a 529 college savings plan. If you’re saving for retirement, use a 401(k) or 403(b) (or similar plan) through your workplace and/or a Roth IRA. If you have a mortgage, you might be able to deduct the interest and pay less income tax (assuming it’s a big mortgage), which does reduce taxes but means that a lot of money is leaving your life in the form of mortgage interest, which may not actually be a win in the first place. Use a tax preparation package, as it will find a lot of other little deductions and credits for you. Those are good strategies to use, and they will help your tax bill, either today or in the future.

Once you get past a lot of that low hanging fruit, though, you start chasing things that are either only really useful for a few people, or only produce a very small savings for a lot of effort, or only apply to people with a big income.

For some, tax avoidance is a bit of a political issue as well. For political reasons, they want to give as little of their money as possible to the government. That’s not my approach. For me, tax strategies are only interesting as a way to keep money in your pocket in a time-efficient way. I’m not interested in lots of effort to save a few bucks on taxes, or chasing down a tax benefit that ends up not really helping you.

When I look at those things and compare them to the multitude of other low hanging fruit in people’s lives, I turn away from chasing a few bucks in tax savings.

Here, Ben Franklin offers some great guidance in that opening quote. “We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly.”

We spend money on many, many needless things.

We constantly buy things that give us little bursts of pleasure, pleasure that very quickly fades. Our minds inherently focus on that burst of pleasure without thinking of the downsides – the cost and the fact that it fades extremely quickly – and convinces us to buy. Simply understanding this is a huge financial game changer; working toward mastering that impulse is a lifelong journey. There is a ton value for the average person in moving along this path, understanding their impulses, and trimming out a lot of them.

We buy things that we believe will save us time, save us effort, make us more attractive, make us look cooler, make us smarter, make us appear to be smarter, and on and on and on. Advertising preys on every bit of our own self-consciousness, nudging us to fix some flaw we perceive in ourselves by buying this product that will just magically fix it – but it won’t. Fixing our own self-image has a ton of financial value. Avoiding advertising does as well. Understanding the spotlight effect leads to realizing that spending money to impress other people is a losing battle unless you’re aiming for a bit of short term glamour to sell something.

We make purchasing decisions based on all kinds of bad and inappropriate information. We rely on brand familiarity. We rely on our internal sense of what we need and want without really parsing it out. We’re easily distracted by store arrangements and flashy advertising and clever displays. Simply being able to stay on task when spending money saves a ton of money, and there are many ways to do that.

We put our attention in the wrong place all the time. This allows businesses to put extra charges on our monthly bills. This allows us to keep subscribing to things out of inertia, even though we don’t use them any more.

We fall prey to countless cognitive biases. (Reading through that original article, some of the individual items barely touched upon on that list deserve full articles of their own.) Our mind often works in ways that led to survival on the ancestral savannah, but utterly fails us in the modern world in terms of saving money and conserving resources.

Those things – and many others – are our true taxes. When we make bad spending decisions, we pay a tax for that. When we fall prey to a fleeting desire that doesn’t bring anything lasting or valuable, we pay a tax. When we don’t see a hidden charge, we pay a tax.

Those are taxes we all pay, all the time, simply by living in the modern world. To me, there’s no wonder that 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck – I’m frankly surprised it’s not even higher than that.

My goal is to help everyone get themselves in a better financial position in life, because the rewards for doing so go far beyond dollars and cents. You feel less stressed about everything. The number of professional opportunities in your life expands rapidly. Unfortunate events are now easily handled rather than devastating catastrophes. This is a life I have worked hard to achieve for myself, and the last thing on earth I want to do is lose this for the sake of fleeting pleasures, cognitive biases, hidden costs, and questionable choices.

If we’re foolish with our money, all the tax strategies in the world won’t help. What saved my financial life did involve a good tax strategy or two, but more than that, it involved cutting all of the other “taxes” in my life. The vanity tax. The fleeting pleasure tax. The “what will others think” tax. The name brand tax. It goes on and on and on.

Cutting your taxes is a good financial strategy, but the government is just one of many, many entities to whom we pay “taxes” of some kind. Cut your true taxes and you’ll find the financial success you seek, just as Benjamin Franklin suggests.

Good luck!

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How One Family Accepted — and Survived — the Pantry Challenge

Don’t get caught out by exorbitant exchange fees this summer

Don’t get caught out by exorbitant exchange fees this summer Stephen Little Wed, 08/14/2019 - 11:56

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Can I appeal the ombudsman’s decision?

Can I appeal the ombudsman’s decision? Simon Read Wed, 08/14/2019 - 11:56

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How do we make a will with a trust for our daughter?

How do we make a will with a trust for our daughter?

My wife and I are in our early 60s and have four children, and we would like to make a will. One of our children has an alcohol addiction and mental health issues, and is on benefits. We have been told it may be best to set up some kind of trust for her. Another daughter is not biologically mine, however we want to make sure that everything is split evenly.

Would it be best if we were to go through a solicitor or our financial adviser? We need to know this is done fairly and correctly, but without unnecessary costs.

What’s the best way to do this and how much will it cost?

Francis Klonowski Wed, 08/14/2019 - 11:56

From

GR/Southampton

This is really something you need to discuss with the solicitor who is drawing up your wills. A financial adviser or financial planner will have a working knowledge of inheritance tax (IHT) and trusts, but the solicitor is the one who can help you set out your requirements properly and legally in the will.

Make sure you choose one who is familiar with trusts rather than just straightforward wills. They will be able to advise whether you should have a separate trust for the first child you mention, or whether one trust may be better with all the children as potential beneficiaries.

There are special tax breaks for trusts where one of the beneficiaries is a vulnerable person, which may be the case with your child. Again, the solicitor will be best placed to advise whether or not she would be eligible. If she is regarded as a vulnerable beneficiary, the trustees can claim special treatment for income tax and capital gains tax – provided the trust assets can only be used for her benefit.

While I appreciate your wish to avoid unnecessary costs, it is far more important to ensure that it is all set up properly to ensure your assets will be distributed in accordance with your wishes. If not, it could be both costly and distressing for your personal representatives to sort out.

The solicitor should be able to give you an approximate cost before you commit to it, including any fixed costs and an estimate of any time charges.

While sorting out the will, you should also use the opportunity to arrange lasting power of attorney if you have not done so already.

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'Commission-free' investment trading platforms are on the rise - but there's a catch

What Do You Do When Your Direct Sales Company Closes its Doors?

Another one bites the dust. At the end of July, the direct sales company, Chloe + Isabel, closed up shop after being in business for eight years. Not long ago, the uber-popular direct sales company, Lia Sophia shut its doors after 28 years of being in business. According to the Chicago Tribune, it’s estimated that […]

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Inflation ticks up in the wake of wage growth with energy bills and council tax to blame