Daily mortgage market insight that you'd never get from the mainstream media.« Can You Guess What Percentage Of Mortgages Are Still Paid On-Time?
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- Mortgage delinquencies are on the rise nationwide, but the news may not be as bad as it appears at first glance.
Using anonymous data from its national credit database, TransUnion reports that 4.58 percent of American homeowners were at least 60 days past due on mortgage payments last quarter.
Comparing the statistic to the data from a year ago, the credit reporting agency goes on to say that mortgage delinquencies are up 53 percent.
Although fair, the comparison carries a distinct, negative connotation because if we flip the data to its positive, the statistics don’t seem nearly as menacing.
Consider: In the last quarter of 2008, 4.58 percent of homeowners were delinquent on their respective mortgages. The positive sign, therefore, is that 95.42 percent of homeowners were not delinquent on their home loans.
Furthermore, in looking at TransUnion’s data for the 5 largest states in the Union, it’s clear that the national delinquency rate is being skewed by California and Florida. New York and Texas, for example, exhibit delinquency rates below the national 4.58 percent marker.
North Dakota’s delinquency rate hovers near 1 percent.
Headlines are designed to attract eyeballs and nothing else. To get the complete story, therefore — the real story — it never hurts to dig a little deeper into the facts.
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Related posts:
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- Guess Which 4 States Accounted For More Than 50 Percent Of May 2008 Foreclosures
- Bank Reposessions Reach Record Levels For The Second Straight Month
- What The Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan Doesn’t Mean To Homeowners
- Why It Doesn’t Matter What The Federal Reserve Does Today
2 comments to “Can You Guess What Percentage Of Mortgages Are Still Paid On-Time?”
It would not be news unless we looked at the negative though
We do have to be careful when looking at statistics when we are trying to understand what is happening in the market. With all of the bad news that we are bombarded with each day, it is easy to forget to keep these numbers in perspective, but you have done that well.
A least it’s not Lake Wobegon, where ~all~ the children are above average!
Inane post. If you want meaningful numbers, compare today’s to more periods in the past.
Actually, the numbers right there are scary enough — more double the recent rate of delinquency, nationwide.