This past summer I wrote about the novel Macroshares trusts released this year that enable investors to speculate on the direction of housing prices. Earlier this week, MacroMarkets announced that instead of terminating in 2014, the trusts will terminate next week. Read the full article

As the end of the year approaches, it’s always a good idea to take see if there are any last-minute moves that make sense for you. Here are four opportunities for tax savings: Read the full article

Yesterday the New England Economic Partnership (NEEP) held its Fall Economic Conference at the Boston Federal Reserve. Regional economists reported that they expect unemployment in New England to peak next year, despite improvements in the national economic outlook. Read the full article

Congress just couldn’t resist the urge to give more money away. Read the full article

Today I found a nice article at Smartmoney.com that summarizes several indicators that can help you make an educated guess as to whether housing prices in an area are likely to go up. Read the full article

As the November 30th deadline for the $8,000 first-time homebuyers credit approaches, members of both the House and the Senate are floating ideas for ways to extend the credit. Read the full article

Yesterday’s second hour of the radio program “On Point” featured the author of “Buy Ketchup in May and Fly at Noon: A Guide to the Best Time to Buy This, Do That, and Go There.” Read the full article

At this time of year it’s a good idea to look for last-minute opportunities to minimize your taxes. Most opportunities require some action before the end of the calendar year; here are several ideas to consider. Read the full article

Home mortgage interest has been a tax-deductible expense on Federal tax returns since 1913. But in a report issued recently, the General Accounting Office (GAO) has recommended that the IRS do a better job of enforcing the rules that apply to the mortgage interest deduction. Read the full article

I can’t say I’m very surprised by this: the IRS is reporting its first prosecution of a fraud scheme involving the new $8,000 first-time homebuyer credit. Read the full article

Last May I attended a talk by Yale economist Robert Shiller in which he indicated that his company, MacroMarkets, was seeking SEC approval for a derivative product tied to home prices. Finally, this week the new “housing ETFs” are available. What are they about, and who should buy them? Read the full article

With the economy still in the doldrums, doing a home renovation could be an excellent idea. It’s a bit counter-intuitive, but hear me out. Read the full article

Today I received updated figures from First American CoreLogic, which maintains one of the nation’s largest databases on residential property transactions. Their January results confirm a wide disparity in housing price changes across the U.S. over the last year. In general, the news is not good. Read the full article

For buyers in the most expensive housing markets, the rules concerning “conforming” mortgages have been confusing over the last year or so. Conforming mortgages are eligible to be purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-run companies that together own or guarantee most home mortgages. One benefit of a conforming mortgage is the all-important interest rate: mortgages whose values exceed a specified amount are not conforming and typically carry interest rates that are ¾% or more higher than conforming mortgage rates. Read the full article

The final version of the 1071-page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is due to be signed by President Obama tomorrow. My summary of the bill's key tax items two weeks ago was not far off the mark, but there are a number of nips and tucks in the final version. Read the full article

As promised, the House and Senate have been busy working on The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which includes several tax law changes intended to boost the economy. Read the full article

With so much attention being given to the $700 billion bailout of banks and the financial industry in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, not much has been said about the individual income tax provisions included in the massive 440-page bill passed last month.

If you'd like to avoid searching the full bill for the parts that might be personally relevant, here's a quick summary of some provisions that could be interesting to you even if you're not an enormous bank. Read the full article

Although most of us are still basking in the joys of summer, winter will be here before we know it. The University of Massachusetts Donahue Institute released a report today projecting the impact of increased energy costs on heating bills in Massachusetts over the next couple of years, and the news is pretty bleak. Read the full article

The Senate bill passed today provides aid for homeowners on the brink of foreclosure, relief for beleaguered mortgage finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and something else: tax breaks for first-time homebuyers and a deduction for homeowners who normally aren’t able to itemize their deductions. Read the full article

Many homeowners struggling to keep up with mortgage payments are probably using their credit cards to make ends meet. Now, apparently, people who can't pay their mortgages have a new alternative: they can charge their monthly mortgage payments to a credit card directly. I wish I were making this up, but I'm not. Read the full article

Over the last fifty years, suburban neighborhoods outside of cities grew for a variety of reasons: families wanted more space than city homes provided, urban crime rates were higher than now (peaking in the 1960's and 70's), and the idealized vision of suburban life grew in popular imagination to become a mark of prestige. Less consciously, perhaps, suburban living was enabled by cheap gas and good roads; the "driveable suburb" within striking distance of city jobs became the ideal place in which to build a home. In the 1948 film, "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House," Cary Grant played an advertising executive whose family flees its cramped New York apartment for a country home in Connecticut. For Jim Blandings, trains enabled the commute; that wasn't the case for most workers who decamped from the cities. The ability to drive to and from work relatively cheaply made the suburban "dream house" possible. Read the full article

One of the consequences of the subprime debacle is a sharp rise in foreclosed properties. Some areas are especially bad off; in May, the majority of homes sold in the Sacramento area were foreclosures. Foreclosures nationwide were up 48% in May vs.the previous year (RealtyTrac.com), and in Massachusetts they were up 32% (ForeclosuresMass.com) over the same period. The rate in MA would have been higher but for a new law that went into effect May 1st, forcing lenders to delay foreclosure proceedings by an additional 60 days. There seem to be quite a few ads claiming that great deals are available through foreclosure sales. Is buying foreclosed property a "can't-fail" way to make money? Read the full article

In the Boston area – and probably elsewhere – residential contractors are looking for work. For most of the last 20 years, and especially in the last decade, it’s been hard to find contractors willing to do small renovation jobs, but with the slump in residential construction, there appears to be window of opportunity. Read the full article

Elsewhere I've written about the localized nature of housing markets. I just discovered that there's a very cool resource at the Boston Federal Reserve Bank website that lets you map foreclosure and subprime mortgage exposure for each MA city and town. Read the full article

Mark Twain is credited with saying a great many things that he may or may not have actually said. Among these is the observation that “People commonly use statistics like a drunk uses a lamp post: for support rather than illumination.” If Twain did say it, he might have had housing statistics in mind. If you pay attention to news reports, you're likely to hear widely-varying assessments of the state of the housing market. Who's right? Read the full article

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