Pocket Idiot's Guide to Mortgages (The Pocket Idiot's Guide) |  | Authors: CFP, CLU, Edie Milligan Driskill, Jamie Sutton
Publisher: Alpha
Category: Book
List Price: $9.95
Buy Used: $0.01
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Seller: Yankee_Clipper_Books_
Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 1,405,585
Media: Paperback
Pages: 240
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 1592571255
Dewey Decimal Number: 332.17530973
EAN: 9781592571253
ASIN: 1592571255
Publication Date: September 2, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Quick facts on everything from a first loan to a strategic refinance.
This helpful guide reveals everything home owners and soon-to-be homeowners need to know in order to get the best deal. Coverage includes:
Determining how much to spend
The application process and overcoming qualification hurdles
Finding the right type of loan and choosing a lender
Closing day considerations
When and how to refinance to save money
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| Customer Reviews:
 Wow! Solid Information, presented very well. September 14, 2003
Danny Price (Douglasville, GA United States)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Anyone new to the mortgage field must have this book. I'm not new, but I would categorize myself as in the early stage of my mortgage career and this book explained a lot that I didn't know. I especially like the sections that explain the Truth-In-Lending Statement, the Good Faith Estimate and the HUD-1.
Nobody explains money like Edie Milligan October 9, 2003
Allen Driskill (Columbus, Ohio USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Absolutely noone explains money issues like Edie Milligan. This book explains everything you ever wanted to know, plus a lot of things you never knew you didn't know.
 Surprisingly Poor March 27, 2005
richard_t (Overseas)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I generally like the Idiot's Guide series, but this book is suprisingly poorly written. My first objection is just a pet peeve. The authors have that strange affectation you hear sometimes from people tryin' to fancy up their vocabulary: they use the word "monies" all the time when they mean "money". Granted, that's just me, but the repeated use of a gimmicky word made the whole book feel sort of cheesy.
My other complaints are substantive. The book is really designed for folks with bad credit or other "qualification hurdles". There's a whole chapter on "If You Don't Fit the Mold", i.e., if you don't qualify for ordinary mortgages and have to be a bit more creative. Plus this same material is repeated in most of the other chapters as well. Fair enough, I'm sure lots of folks out there have credit "hurdles" and need some good advice. But by reaching for this niche market, the authors have made a choice to include 20 or 30 pages that aren't useful to the majority of home-buyers who do Fit the Mold. I riffed through all this extraneous material but was disappointed to find there simply wasn't much of use to me.
When I was looking for real, concrete tips, I found little more than bland generalizations. With the complicated and articulated mortgage market these days, it would be great to get some advice on how to identify, solicit, and sift through all the dozens or hundreds of mortgage lenders out there. Instead, Chapter 2 merely tells me that there are several types of lenders out there (um, yes, I could tell that by the several types of spam that hit my e-mail account every day), and that I should interview lenders before selecting one. Well, that's not real helpful.
The book feels hastily-written. The authors seem competent. They eagerly explain all about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and try, in their haphazard way, to describe some of the details of the loan process. But at the end of the book, I still have dozens of unanswered questions about my own case.
My recommendation: take a pass on this book. A better and more informative buy is Ilyce Glink's "100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask". Glink provides more comprehensive, more recent, and more useful information, as well as websites and other background materials.
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