Access Group, a non-profit premier originator and servicer of private educational loans and a third party servicer as well, has recently been declared the “Top Workplace” in a yearly competition patronized by Delaware’s ‘The News Journal’.

Access Group was awarded this title in the category of ‘Midsize Companies’. Overall 90 employers participated from Delaware in this ‘workplace analysis’ survey. The survey was conducted among 13,522 employees who represent 7.9% of Delaware’s working population.

The survey was conducted electronically by Workplace Dynamics from the employees of 90 contesting employers. The survey asked the employees to give ratings to their organization on factors such as quality of workplace, its environment, organizational culture, Management’s leadership style, quality of colleagues, training programs offered to employees, perks other than the pay and the adequacy of pay itself.

Delaware’s ‘The News Journal’ distributed the survey among 13 sectors of the state’s total business sectors including insurance, health care, financial services, education, non-profit, hospitality, retail and professional services.

This is the fourth time that Access Group has been declared as the ‘Top Workplace’ in the ‘Best in the Business’ contest. It was the company’s 2nd consecutive victory in 2 years and fourth time overall that it has been titled as ‘Top Workplace’.

“In these times, it is especially important that we celebrate our employees and focus on the positive. Our future as a company depends on our employees’ commitment to excellence and we want to recognize their hard work and dedication,” said Christopher P. Chapman, Access Group’s president and chief executive officer.

An Access-Group-Employee wrote the comments on his survey that he was satisfied with the ambitions of the company because the company finds innovative ways to remain competitive, maintain its profitability and organically increase its business.

If you have any exposure to the world of finance and loans, then you must be aware of how important a good credit rating is. Good money management is the first step to achieving a high credit score. The skill of keeping your credit score high involves having just the right debt/income ratio, the appropriate number of credit cards with the right proportion of credit availed to the debt available, and other factors like these.

There are quite a few steps involved from obtaining credit till achieving a high credit rating for example several years of paying in time and obtaining loans without using your credit card e.g. by getting home or car loans. Beware that student loans you take also get reported to the credit rating agencies and are accounted for when computing your credit score.

There may come times in your life when some incidents distort your credit rating for a few months. Some of these incidents are so severe in nature e.g. losing your job, resulting in insolvency and/or foreclosures, which permanently put you off the track of maintaining a good credit score.

It’s however interesting to note that the only those people who in fact don’t actually need loans are able to achieve the credit scores which command the lowest interest rate on loans.

A number of websites on the internet have popped up which help both the people with low credit ratings and those with high scores, with tools for financial budgeting and fixing goals as well as a large repository of related information.

Mint.com has launched its application for all android phones as well. Earlier it was available for iPhone only. The app allows the subscribers to check their account activity and closing balances from their cell phones. But it doesn’t permit account management which is there to prevent unauthorized users from effecting any unscrupulous financial transactions from your mobile.

With just 19 days left for the first time home buyers to grasp the opportunity and take benefit of federal tax credit amounting to $8,000, most of the new homeowners are not even aware of this golden opportunity.

A home must be on a contract by April 30th and closed by June 30th as per the tax credit terms which means that the potential homeowner has to search a home within only 19 days to be eligible to get the federal tax credit.

The irony is that a lot of people who want a home think that they either can’t purchase one or they won’t be able to get financing for their dream home. In this situation Stafford Realty comes to their rescue.

Quite a few banks in the locality are luring qualifying buyers with special lending offers. For example their Special Financing Package for Mills Creek Village offers a 4.45 percent interest rate. Further terms of the loan say that this is up to 95% financing with a $750 fee for the loan, with no PMI, and the lending bank will also finance up to $2,000 in the closing costs.

Michael Duncan, an expert Realtor at Stafford Realty says,” Qualified buyers paying over $800 per month in rent should be able to easily afford purchasing a new home and taking advantage of the First-Time Home Buyer Tax Credit”. So now if you are able to pay your rent, you can easily own a home for the same amount because the mortgage is usually less expensive or is same as the rent you would be paying now.

Starting at only $156,900, all are 2-story homes having 3 bedrooms, 2-1/2 baths, and a one-car garage with no nagging neighbors upstairs or downstairs which is a pretty attractive living for an average homeowner.

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According to recent news, credit cards, with the great amount of their benefits and facilities, are ruining the market for personal loans. The rates for personal loans have sky-rocketed to 12.6% for a $5000 loan which is a record high since 2000, despite the fact that base rate is an all-time low these days.

The lenders personal pricing methods usually make a loan quite expensive with the inclusion of hidden costs. This is generally due to the borrower having a poor credit rating making loan deal quite unattractive to the borrower. Also the interest rates are sometimes not the same as publicized. Due to these problems, experts consider a credit card offering a low interest rate to be better when compared to any cheap loan deal. That’s why credit cards are being used as one of the most prevalent source to avail finance.

Barclaycards simplicity credit card charges only a variable 6.8%. Similarly, the Halifax Easy Rate MasterCard has a rate of 6.9% and the Co-op’s Platinum Tracker Visa offer 7.7% interest rate.

‘Low-rate credit cards are simple. There is no interest-free period, no reward scheme and no other features of the card — just a low interest rate’, says Michelle Slade on the Money Facts website.

So, the least expensive interest rate you can get on a personal loan of $5000 is from Tesco, i.e. 7.8%. Tesco checks your credit score and those with bad credit score are charged an interest rate as high as 15.9%. Even Sainsbury offers you rates ranging from 7.8% upto18.8%.

A lot of options for ‘bad credit home mortgage refinance’ are available these days for people who are unable to pay as per their current installment structure and who are considering for refinancing their homes. Typically, mortgage refinance is recommended only when it offers a rate which is at least 2% lower than that of the original mortgage.

Home mortgage refinancing can be availed through four methods as explained below:

1. Cash-out refinancing: The borrower renews the mortgage for an amount which is greater than the amount owed at the time of refinancing. The difference can be cashed out and can be utilized for home improvements and increasing its value or for paying excessive credit card borrowings.

2. Low fixed-rate refinancing: This option can be considered if the borrower already has a low rate ARM or high interest fixed rate mortgages. This is to be ensured that the percentage difference is at least equal to the closing costs and fees related to the home refinance loan.

3. Long term refinance loan: This mode of refinancing can be availed if you are finding it difficult to pay your monthly mortgage installments. For this, your home should have ample equity built-up. Besides, you may be required to pay for the refinancing costs and fees.

4. Short term refinance loan: Those among you who plan to build equity on their homes and then immediately own it, this option is for you. The monthly mortgage payments are scheduled to increase but more money would have to be contributed towards prinicipal. You can thus avail larger tax deduction benefits on interest paid.

The bottom line is, if you have adequate equity in your home, you can shift to short term refinance from a long term one without having any significant rise in your monthly mortgage installments.

Analysts are expecting another 5-10 percent decline in housing prices in the near future.

A slow economic recovery, high unemployment, increasing foreclosures, growing inventory of homes, an absence of a federal home buyer tax incentives and record low permits for new homes, all have up to some extent contributed in collapsing the U.S. home sales.

Great recession of 2008 and 2009 was brought by the downturn of this very U.S. housing market. After an improvement in late 2009 and early 2010, it seems like the housing market seems has started weakening again after the federal home buyer tax credit expiration at the end of April.

We have seen, in spite of extremely low mortgage rates and increased affordability, the prices of U.S homes and the volume of home sales has hitherto remained deflated.

Following reasons can be attributed to have been the cause of buyers’ inability to come to marketplace:

1. People are not willing to take the burden of further mortgage debt.

2. The decline in home prices has devalued about a quarter of the equity of all mortgage holders. These people are unable to relocate or to refinance their homes thereby slowing the demand.

3. Due to low expectation of any rise in housing market prices, people are pessimistic about investing in the market while others are still waiting for the prices to further fall down.

4. Today, a fewer number of people are able to qualify the stringent lending standards for home loan as compared to the number qualifying in the past.

5. High unemployment is keeping people away from purchasing homes as people don’t have stable incomes.

It is believed that the employment outlook and public policies will play key roles in the eventual revival of the housing market.

Despite declining home prices, purchasing a home is still not possible for a lot of Americans. The month of July saw the National Association of Realtors’ housing affordability index sustained at its high i.e. 161.8. An index of 100 means that a family earning the median income in the U.S. can afford to buy a median priced home.

The number of people who actually own or have a mortgaged home is also declining since every month foreclosure crises takes back more than 100,000 homes on average. Although this would have had an increasing effect on the number of renters throughout the country. The number of renters haven’t increased that much because of the fact that most of them move in with their relatives and friends. The considerably lower home prices and record low mortgage have failed to attract the average American citizen because he or she is still unable to afford it.

The plight of American citizens can be observed from the fact that the percentage of households in the San Luis Obispo county of California in July that could afford to buy any home was 48% whereas the median price of a home is about $337,000. Consequently, the minimum income grossed over a year which would meet the requirements for a home at that price turns out to be $55,670.

San Luis Obispo having a population of just 46,712 is although situated halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, but doesn’t provide large employers for its residents. For this reason the residents have to work on low paying jobs ($10-$12 per hour) and that’s why they find themselves unable to buy a home. The bottom line is that San Luis Obispo is just an example of the condition of most of the country as we see new homes built everyday, but an average American is unable to afford to buy them.

Arkansas house sales, with12, 532 units sold in the first six months of the year, were up by a healthy 12.54 percent over the sales totals in 2009. The cumulative value of the homes sold during this period was 1.797 billion dollars, up 10.89 percent over last year’s total.

These figures were released in an amended report issued on August 30^th by the Arkansas Realtors Association. The report also provides figures for individual counties. Sebastian County home sales were a big boost to the overall growth in home sales.

Home sales in this county were up more than 14 percent for the first half of the year. Home sales in the first half of 2010 were boosted, as they were across the nation by the Federal government’s homebuyer’s tax credit. The tax credit was a program put in place by the Obama administration in order to stimulate the housing market and make it easier for first time buyers to enter the housing market.

The Federal tax credit cited for Arkansas gave first-time home buyers a credit of $8,000 dollars and other home buyers a tax credit of $6,500. This provided a much needed boost in the housing markets, not only in Arkansas but nationwide. Now that that tax credit is no longer in place, most housing market experts predict that house sales will decline through the remaining months of the year.

Evidence of the decline in the housing market was particularly evident in Crawford and Sebastian County home sales where the figures were down more than 39 percent. Crawford County had only 31 new and used homes sold in July, a drop of 35 percent over the same month in 2009. Sebastian County had 84 home sales and that represents a 40 percent fall from the same period a year earlier.

The two biggest mortgage lenders in the United States, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have just put in the shade many homeowners plans to be environmentally and economically green. The homeowners have been participating in a plan called Property Assessed Clean Energy or PACE.

The program has been operational in 22 States and others were thinking of participating. It was a simple scheme that allowed homeowners who participated in the program to repay the costs of solar panels and other energy improvements through a surcharge on their home. PACT allowed municipalities to sell bonds in order to finance loans to improve energy efficiency. Homeowners would then pay back the loan through a 20 year annual property tax assessment.

As is normal with tax assessments procedures, a lien is automatically placed on the property that has priority over the mortgage whenever the homeowner defaults on the monthly payment.

The Federal Finance Housing Authority, the government body that oversees mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, issued guidance to lenders in July that the program violated the underwriting standards of the agency.

Freddie and Fannie buy and sell most of the nations home mortgages so this effectively derailed the PACE program. This week the agencies said that efforts to resolve the disputes over the program had failed. This means that people enrolled in the PACE program must pay back the home energy loan before they will be allowed to refinance their mortgages.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have stated that homeowners with enough equity built up in their homes to pay of the energy loan must do so before refinancing but that people without sufficient equity will be allowed to refinance with the loan in place. Supporters of the PACE program have pointed out the numerous benefits of allowing people to install solar panels and other energy improvements, including the reduction of greenhouse gasses and the creation of jobs.

Lawsuits have been filed against Fannie and Freddie by the State of California and the Sierra Club to block them from halting the program. Legislation has also been introduced in congress to allow the PACE program to continue.

The U.S Department of Education released a report this month based on the repayment rate of 2009 for those students who graduated or school leavers between the years 2004 right through 2008. It includes repayment data from more that 8,000 universities, colleges and various technical schools. One fact that emerged from the study is that there is a wide range of percentages in the payback rates of students from the institutions of higher learning looked at in the report.

In the Miami Valley area the alumni of Cedarville University are paying down their student loans at a rate of 88 percent, far higher than other schools in the area. When asked why he thought that was, the President of Cedarville Bill Brown expressed his thoughts that there were two very good reasons for his student’s high repayment rate.

He claims that by installing a great sense of integrity among the students, and the need to pay something you owe is the reason for this high rate of repayment. The next factor has to do with the institutions commitment and aggressiveness in helping students gain entrance in the employment world and proper job placements. This ensures they are in a better position to make the payments of the loans they owe.

Cedarville University not only had the highest federal student loan repayment rate in 2009, it also ranked as on of the top 20 undergraduate colleges in the entire country. Some other area colleges did not fare so well in the report with the repayment rate of student loans by their alumnus. The University of Dayton came in second with a repayment rate of 69 percent while Wittenberg University was just behind them with 68 percent of their students paying back the money they borrowed.

Both Urbana State University and Wright State University showed a rather dismal 48 percent student loan repayment rate; less than half of their students are paying back the money that they owe. It can be considerably more difficult to accurately gauge the student loan repayment rate of people who attended the two local community colleges.