Chicago Mortgages

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Investors chasing yield in this low-rate environment are jumping into alternative vehicles. That's helping closed-end income funds stage a comeback. Such funds, which offer a fixed number of shares and are closed to new capital once...

By John Wasik CHICAGO, April 26 (Reuters) - Investors chasing yield in this low-rate environment are jumping into alternative vehicles. That's helping closed-end income funds stage a comeback. Such funds, which offer a fixed number of shares and are...

Mark Mangum, who lives deep in the heart of Texas football country, has found a way to capitalize on his location. He periodically rents his house to football fans, a move that takes the sting out of his $1,300 monthly mortgage and helped pay for costs...

It's Money Smart Week, a collection of free financial literacy programs offered throughout the week, aimed at helping people deal with virtually every money issue imaginable: from how to get out of debt, to buying homes, paying for college, building a...

If you can't get in — or can't afford — a top business school, is an MBA from a lesser-known school worth it? The answer depends largely on the student. Those gunning for the top of the organizational chart, and without the networking...

More than 50 struggling Chicago-area homeowners last year placed their faith and their savings into the hands of Washington National Trust, which promised to save their homes from foreclosure. The homeowners, most of them Hispanic and living in Aurora,...

Some of the Chicago neighborhoods hardest hit by the housing crisis are starting to come back, or at least appear to be bottoming out. Home values in the Pullman/Riverdale/Roseland neighborhoods, for instance, rose by an average of 18.6 percent last year...

Co-borrowers may want to rethink whose name goes first on a mortgage application. Early findings from a study under way at the Woodstock Institute found that in the six-county Chicago area, joint applications for home purchases and refinancings were much...

Sales of distressed homes in Illinois surged last year, particularly transactions designed to keep properties out of foreclosure. Of the 44,337 distressed homes sold in Illinois last year, 16,449 were short sales, an increase of 53 percent from 2011,...

The Illinois Supreme Court on Friday announced new rules governing mortgage foreclosures that will require lenders to prove to judges that they have exhausted all efforts to help a borrower before seeking a foreclosure judgment against the homeowner. The...

The year-old national mortgage settlement has provided more than $45 billion in relief to distressed mortgage borrowers nationally, but improving the mortgage servicing process is proving to be more elusive. In a report issued Thursday on the progress of...

The nation's fair-housing rules became clearer this month when the Department of Housing and Urban Development finalized a rule that it hopes makes it easier to determine whether a housing practice is discriminatory. The formal adoption of uniform...