Don’t let closing costs take you by surprise
Everyone knows that financing and closing on a home purchase can be complicated. Which is why more than a year ago the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a set of...
Home > Reviews
All Stories
The Michael Flynn head-scratcher: The case of a cover-up in search of a crime
It's a Watergate-era cliche that the cover-up is always worse than the crime. In the Michael Flynn affair, we have the first recorded instance of a cover-up in the absence...
Trump toxicity has Republicans on the run from constituents
Republican Rep. Peter Roskam of Illinois has a safe seat in Congress. So what's he running from? First, supporters of the Affordable Care Act showed up at his office for...
IRS may be stepping up scrutiny of mortgage deductions
If you're like millions of homeowners, you recently received a familiar, innocuous-looking document from your lender. It's called Form 1098 and it totes up how much interest you paid on...
Trump sides with the sheriffs on their civil forfeiture racket
The technique has been called (by this columnist) "immunity through profusion." By keeping the molten lava of falsehoods flowing, the volcano that is Donald Trump can inundate the public and...
Alleged realty kickbacks prompt penalties from consumer agency
If your real estate agent requires you to get a mortgage preapproval from one specific lender as a condition of submitting an offer to buy a house — even if...
Credit, debt dings don’t always doom mortgage applications
How tough is it to get approved for a mortgage? How low can your FICO credit score go before your lender shows you the door? And how much monthly debt...
Trump’s foreign policy revolution puts us on a disastrous path
The flurry of bold executive orders and of highly provocative Cabinet nominations (such as a secretary of education who actually believes in school choice) has been encouraging to conservative skeptics...
Tax reform could knock your real estate investment plans off track
The small-scale owners of millions of rental homes, parcels of investment land and income-producing commercial and business real estate might not know it, but one of their key financial planning...
Obama’s self-revealing final acts
Barack Obama did not go out quietly. His unquiet final acts were, in part, overshadowed by a successor who refused to come in quietly and, in part, by Obama's own...