Paul Ellis-Graham, a high school US history teacher from Orange County, has created a variation on the game Monopoly to make it more like real life. He says:
Someone born wealthy would already start the game with money and property. The people in middle-class families might own Ventnor Avenue or Marvin Gardens. The poor families don’t start out owning any property
The article has an emphasis on the value of teaching labor studies. From the New York Teacher publication.
When you pay the mortgage on any property, you have to pay the bank 10% interest.
If you buy mortgaged property from someone, you have to pay the mortgage and 10% interest right away.
That’s in Monopoly. Wish life were that simple, don’t you? Unfortunately, mortgages are complicated, involve lots of fees, and require lots of paperwork.
In the board game Monopoly, you can mortgage the properties you own. What does this do? It gives you some cash to work with, so that you can buy more properties.
Like real mortgages, you have to pay back the money with interest. It sounds pointless to mortgage properties, then, if you look at it strictly in terms of how much you owe.
The trick is to mortgage properties so that you can use the money to buy as many properties as possible. Real estate in Monopoly always appreciates (for the most part), so it’s an investment that’s worth the price of having to mortgage your other properties.
In real life, property values aren’t as guaranteed to go up. However, real estate prices tend to increase in the long term. Mortgaging your properties in the real world to buy new properties may be as good an idea as it is in Monopoly. A little debt might be worth the huge profits.
Fannie Mae has some looser government restrictions than other financial institutions do.
According to Wikipedia, they can sell mortgage-backed securities with only half of the normal money backing them up. But it’s not really justified to allow this because Fannie Mae offers no real guarantee, even though it might seem like one exists because of their ties to the government.
Critics, including Alan Greenspan, say that the risk is artificially lowered.
Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) is just another name for Fannie Mae.
It is traded on NYSE as FNM.
http://www.nyse.com/about/listed/lcddata.html?ticker=FNM
Fannie Mae is a private company. They buy mortgages from lenders. Then, the lenders can use the money from it to make more mortgages. This market is called the secondary mortgage market.
So basically they make sure that lenders have enough money to offer lots and lots of mortgages to home buyers.
The federal government created Fannie Mae in 1938, which created the secondary mortgage market. Then in 1968, Fannie Mae turned private.
Fannie Mae “provides financial products and services that make it possible for low-, moderate-, and middle-income families to buy homes of their own,” according to their website.
They have a lender search tool that lets you search the Fannie Mae-approved lenders by state.
http://www.mortgagecontent.net/flApplication/fanniemae/findLender.jsp?p=Find+a+Lender+Search
Utah.gov has a list of registered mortgage lenders from all over the country.
Browse the list here:
http://www.dfi.utah.gov/mtglist1.htm
Download the list here:
http://www.dfi.utah.gov/Mtg-down.htm
As of this posting, the list of mortgage lenders was last updated on February 28, 2005.
This is probably the only site about mortgages you’ll find that has no ulterior motive. Enjoy while it lasts!
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