A bipartisan housing bill just became law. It won't help you now. The article admits this in the headline. The new bill provides zero fast relief. But here are some mortgage tools that can help you right now.
Notice the sleight of hand. They sold you a housing bill. Then they pivoted to mortgage tools you could have googled yesterday. The bill is irrelevant. The tools existed before the bill. The bill existing changes nothing about the tools. But they needed you to click on something about a housing bill so they could tell you about refinancing.
This is financial journalism at its purest. Create urgency around legislation. Deliver advice unrelated to that legislation. Pretend the two are connected. Homebuyers reading this think Congress just did something. Congress did nothing for them today. The mortgage tools were always there. Rate shopping existed last year. Adjustable-rate mortgages predate the bill by decades. None of this required bipartisan cooperation.
The bill is comprehensive though. That's the word they used. Comprehensive means it's long and no one read it. Bipartisan means it passed because neither party cared enough to fight. When something is both comprehensive and bipartisan, it usually means everyone agreed to fund something expensive that won't work for five years.
But you need help right now. So here are tools. The tools are: shop for lower rates, consider an ARM, improve your credit score, save more money for a down payment. Groundbreaking stuff. This is advice your parents gave you in 2003.
The housing bill won't provide fast relief because housing bills never provide fast relief. They provide slow paperwork and tax credits you'll forget to claim. The mortgage tools can help you right now because they're not actually tools, they're just decisions you were allowed to make before Congress woke up this morning.
Photo by Precondo CA on Unsplash
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