Hasta La Gadget!

The TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure Rule (TRID), in development by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) for several years, became effective October 3, 2015. One of its major purposes was to help borrowers understand and cope with the deluge of documents they must read and sign prior to closing on a mortgage. This series of articles will consider how and where CFPB succeeded or fell short, and it will provide a complementary approach that should make it easier for borrowers to cope with the deluge.

Replacing Irreconcilable Documents

For decades, mortgage borrowers had to cope with irreconcilable disclosures mandated by HUD and the Federal Reserve. There was no way for a borrower to match the figures on the Good Faith Estimate disclosure (GFE, mandated by HUD) with those on the Truth in Lending disclosure (TIL, mandated by the Federal Reserve). One of the charges directed to the CFPB was to combine the GFE and TIL, which it has done in a new document called the Loan Estimate.

As with the disclosures it replaces, the Loan Estimate must be provided to the borrower within 3 business days following the submission of an application. While that document is far from perfect, as I’ll discuss in a later article in this series, it is far better than the disclosures it replaced.

New List of Service Providers

A new disclosure, provided to borrowers at the same time as the Loan Estimate, is a list of third party services and service providers, divided into two groups: one group is services for which the borrower can shop, either the firms listed or other firms. The second group is services that must be purchased from the firms listed. Of course, lenders who have a financial interest in a third party service provider will list that provider in the second group, which makes a referral to that provider automatic. Why is CFPB strengthening one of the least savory features of this market?

Providing Borrowers With More Time To Study Closing Documents

TRID also has a new “Closing Disclosure” that replaces the old HUD-1 disclosure. While the form is much the same, the new disclosure must be received by the borrower at least 3 business days prior to closing. Previously, the borrower had only one day to study the documents received at closing. Some recent surveys indicate that more borrowers are reading the disclosures prior to the closing.

However, the CFPB controls only a few of the documents contained in the typical closing package; the remaining documents are required by other Federal agencies, states, and the individual lender dealing with the borrower. Each entity is focused on its own disclosure, and how it fits into the total package is ignored. TRID does not address this fundamental problem, which is a major focus of this series of articles. The key to making the package of closing documents manageable to borrowers is to classify them into different groups that call for different treatment.

Classifying Documents

This approach divides the document package the borrower receives into 4 groups. Only one of them requires the borrower’s careful scrutiny immediately before or at the closing. The categories are as follows:

Junk documents are of no value to the borrower, so the objective should be to identify and sign them as quickly as possible.

Educational documents contain information the borrower should know, and should be read and digested any time before the closing.

Future Use documents may become relevant in the future and should be accessible, but no time need be expended on them at or before closing.

Transactional documents contain the details of the mortgage loan, which probably changed during the loan processing period, requiring the borrower’s full attention subject to the greatest time pressure.

A major reason for identifying the first three categories of documents is to reserve as much time and attention as possible for examining the fourth.
To be continued . . .

For more unbiased advice on mortgages visit my website The Mortgage Professor

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Thirty years ago this month “Top Gun” hit theaters, shooting to the top of the box office and becoming the highest-grossing movie of 1986.

The Tony Scott-directed film, which follows trainees at the Navy’s Fighter Weapons School in San Diego, starred a young Tom Cruise as Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a naval aviator aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. Cruise graced the big screen alongside Val Kilmer, Kelly McGillis, Tom Skerritt, Rick Rossovich, Tim Robbins and Anthony Edwards.

Rossovich, who starred as Ron “Slider” Kerner (a junior grade lieutenant), told The Huffington Post, “We met and we gelled as a group and we took San Diego by storm. We just had a ball in that city … We took over the Navy. Can you do that today? I don’t think so. We were on the USS Enterprise,” he added. “They flew us on. And I was out to sea with 6,000 men for several days and it was like, ‘What an experience!’ … It all became CGI after that.”

During a recent interview with HuffPost, Rossovich provided behind-the-scenes insight into the making of the film, now officially in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

How the actors spent their downtime

“I did a lot of photography behind the scenes, and Val actually had a video camera. There’s a lot of stuff behind the scenes on that video tape, let me tell you. It was great. So it kind of puts my life into little snapshots. I was married for two years at the time, and now I’m celebrating my 33rd anniversary … I was one of the few guys who were married.”

Rossovich’s off-set accident

“I almost killed my wife the day before I flew in the jet. I was on a bridge on Mission Bay and I was involved in a car crash. It totaled the vehicle I was in — and miraculously none of us [were] hurt … But then the next day I got into a jet and she was on the runway in a Jeep and she watched me fly away, out overseas … He [the pilot] pulled out every trick. He even stalled the airplane … He turned it off and we sailed for a little bit and then he turned it on, which you’re not really supposed to do. He did some really horrible left-hand turns and I thought we were crashing. He really wanted to make me vomit, but I didn’t. We saw all that stuff when we saw our daily [footage] — we saw who threw up, who didn’t.”

The first time Rossovich met director Tony Scott

“When I first met Tony, I went to Paramount for the meeting and I walked in and we just started chatting and I broke the ice. We’re having a nice conversation, and I looked down at the floor and there was a Bruce Weber book on the floor in a pile of books. On that cover was a shot of a guy from the Navy and it looked like me from the back … I look exactly like this guy. And I said, ‘Tony, look, there I am. That’s a picture of me, you know!’ And at first he couldn’t tell if I was lying or not, and of course I was lying. And eventually I was cast … He was so genuine. He was so warm. You trusted him and you could be yourself.”

What it was like having Tom Cruise as a co-star

“There was a hierarchy on the set. Tom was the star. I remember where we were staying — The Bahia — and I remember going to Tom’s room, and we were all going to do something. But we were waiting to see him on ‘Entertainment Tonight’ the first time. I think it was [for] ‘Risky Business,’ or something. I worked with him before on a little movie called ‘Losin’ It’ that we had done a few years before, so I knew him a bit and we were friendly. We all gelled. And there was a real camaraderie. It was a group effort. We knew what buttons to push and what not to push. And then it was over. In three or four months, it was over.”

Inside the “Top Gun” stunts

“It wasn’t a bunch of hocus-pocus. It was real. They were flying jets. I landed on a carrier in a helicopter. And I took off in the oldest plane the Navy had at the time. It kind of scared me for a second, because the plane just dropped. It was a propeller plane … and I reached over and I grabbed the guy’s hand next to me.”

The longevity of the film

“That movie has kind of been with me every day of my life, like a family member. I was in the paint store the other day in Sweden and the guy I get my paint from was talking about ‘Top Gun’ and he had stories. And he lives in a little town in the middle of Sweden! It’s a phenomenon that certain movies get to — and get to stay relevant.”

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

In many countries, the 1st of June is celebrated as international children’s day. Over my years working to end the institutionalization of children, I have often come to wonder what that means. I would like to think it is the day on which we focus our attention on how far we have come in realizing children’s rights, in empowering children to find and use their voices, in learning as adults to listen and work in partnership with children and truly respect their opinions. But my experiences have taught me otherwise.

Frequently in institutions in Eastern Europe, I have asked children when their birthday was. In many institutions, one after another, the children replied “the 1st of June”. How could so many children have the same birthday, I wondered. Then a member of staff explained: “No, they don’t understand the question. There are too many of them for us to celebrate each of their real birthdays. So we celebrate all of them on the 1st of June”. I looked around the sea of shaved heads, identical clothing, emaciated bodies and hollowed eyes only to realize that every last vestige of their identity – what makes them individual, makes them special – had been taken from them. I was suddenly struck by what identity really means: a complex mixture of history shared with others, a sense of being special and different as an individual, whilst belonging powerfully to a group who have known you every day of your life. And how this was gone for children in institutions.

In the year 2000, together with UNICEF, I was researching the burgeoning process of ‘deinstitutionalization’ in Romania. Some counties had already closed institutions and the government was gearing up to develop a national strategy. I was asked to travel the country looking at the process of change – finding out what worked and what didn’t. The lessons I learned would form the basis of my model of ’10 elements’ necessary to ensure that the deinstitutionalization process worked for all the children involved.

In seven counties, I met children who had moved from institutions. In one county, the authorities had decided to close an institution that they had only opened several years before. The Romanian system of institutionalization separated groups of siblings in a seemingly arbitrary manner. Institutions were organized by age, gender and disability. So it was not uncommon to find four siblings living in four different institutions. In this county, they had learned that separating siblings was harmful, so they established an institution in which they could bring all the sibling groups together. In theory, this was a step in the right direction. In practice, more than 170 girls and boys, aged 4 to 18 years, lived together with little adult supervision. Bullying and abuse were rife and the smallest children – now living in foster families – were clearly still traumatized a year after the institution had closed.

I interviewed many children who had moved from the institution, including some older teenaged boys. No appropriate family-based placements had been found for them, so they had simply been moved to another institution for older boys. They had been told that no families had been found for them because they were the ‘naughty’ children. Being moved to another institution was seen as a punishment. I asked the boys how they had been prepared for the move to their new home.

They did not understand the question, so I tried again: “How did the staff in the institution tell you that you were going to move to another institution?” “They tricked us”, said one 14-year-old boy. When I asked what he meant, his eyes filled with tears and his voice choked, so another boy helped him: “It was the 1st of June, children’s day, and they told us we were going on a day trip. Two buses pulled up outside the gates and they told the boys to get in one bus, the girls to get in the other. And they brought us here. They didn’t even give us the chance to say goodbye to our sisters”. I looked around at all the boys. Their eyes were lowered and several were struggling to hold back the tears. “Have you seen your sisters since?” I asked them. “No”, they replied. Then one asked me urgently, “do you know where they are?” I promised I would try to find out.

Their sisters had been moved to an institution for girls. It was only 13 kilometers away from the boys’ home, yet no-one had seen fit to organize opportunities for them to meet or even to communicate. I spoke to the State social services, strongly recommending that regular visits be organized between the siblings. But I was struck more than anything by a system so uncaring that it could take the one day of the year that was meant to be special for institutionalized children and turn it into a nightmare of grief and terror.

This incident has led me to fight over the years for the inclusion of children’s voices and opinions, wishes and aspirations to be at the heart of any process of transforming children’s services. Turning the residents of institutions back from numbers into individual children, each with their identity, their family (even if absent) and their history, is the first step in ending institutionalization. If international children’s day is to mean anything, then it is up to adults to promote the rights of every child – to a family, to a voice, to a future.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Your old social media accounts are back to haunt you.

Email addresses and passwords for MySpace accounts created before June 11, 2013, have been “made available” on a hacker forum, the social network said Tuesday. Tumblr logins from around the same time have also been posted, but those passwords are “salted and hashed,” which means they’re harder for a hacker to actually use.

If you’re not in the habit of updating passwords, now might be the time to start. Using the same password on multiple sites leaves you vulnerable when breaches like this happen. For example, if your Gmail password matches an old MySpace one, a bad actor could now gain access to your inbox and all of the private information stored within it.

The revelations come after LinkedIn announced this month that more than 100 million accounts were potentially compromised as a result of hacking. 

The best practice is to use a unique password for every account you create online. And you should enable two-factor authentication when you can — meaning you’ll also have to input a separate password sent to a standalone device (like your mobile phone) when you log into a service for the first time.

To get a sense of whether your data is at risk, take a look at “have I been pwned?” It’s a website that cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt compiled, which checks your email address against known breaches.

The example above used my personal email address. Unbeknownst to me, my data had potentially been exposed by a “Lord of the Rings Online” breach; frustrating since I only played the game a couple of times. 

That’s a helpful reminder, though. While online services can feel so quick and ephemeral, the data they generate is basically permanent. 

H/T BBC

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

New York City. It is the city where anyone can do or be anything, anywhere and at any time. As a citizen of New York City I love that by simply walking out my front door, I am always finding the most interesting and ambitious people around the big apple. But not everyone around the world is as fortunate as the 8 million New York City locals who have the daily opportunity to witness first hand all that happens in America’s biggest city. Now however, thanks to the recent growth of Snapchat, they can experience New York City life every single day.

Snapchat is being used to tell interesting stories all over the city! From storytellers, to photographers, to entrepreneurs, brands and even daily vloggers. I did some research and collected the Snapchat accounts that capture the most need to see stories in New York City on a frequent and daily basis. You can add any of these great accounts by either adding their Snapchat username which is located next to their name below or by their snapcode. To add someone by snapcode simply open up Snapchat, point the camera at the snapcode and tap the screen.

Harris Markowitz: (Markowitz)
Category: Storytellers

Harris Markowitz is one of the most unique and creative individuals on Snapchat. His stop motion stories are not to be missed. Harris is a full-time Snapchat filmmaker and owner of the Snapchat production company, A Cereal Production, where he works with both small companies and major corporations after leaving his full-time gig at Twitter. He was a Shorty Awards finalist for Snapchatter of the Year.

Gary Vaynerchuk: (Garyvee)
Category: Business

In the digital marketing world Gary’s company Vayner Media leads the way in social media marketing and Gary personally goes all in on each new social platform on the rise. With Snapchat currently growing Gary has been snapping his hustle all around the city each day. If you need some motivation to hustle, you need to follow Garyvee on Snapchat.

Kevin Siskar: (Krsiskar)
Category: Entrepreneurs

Kevin works with startup founders all over the city and has recently started snapping about startup life in New York. He runs the Founder Institute Startup Accelerator in NY and is also the host of the Ambition Today podcast where he interviews successful people to figure out how they built something out of nothing. Follow Krsiskar on snapchat to keep up with the latest in startups and life around the big apple.

Geoff Golberg: (Golberg)
Category: Travel

Geoff is relatively new to Snapchat but well-versed in live video. He was a Shorty Awards nominee for Periscoper of the Year who is known for his authentic approach to sharing the sights and sounds of NYC. From the top of the Empire State Building to breaking news to musicians to New York Fashion Week, Geoff shares it all. Now he is also sharing those adventures on Snapchat as Golberg.

Frankie Greek: (wtfrankie)
Category: Storytellers

Frankie leads social media for Fuse TV and The Shorty Awards. She also launched the Times Square Ball’s Snapchat account last year, sharing a behind the scenes glimpse into the mayhem that is NYE in Times Square. More recently she snapped the Coachella experience via Fuse TV’s Snapchat account. Frankie’s high-energy stories are a window into the life of an NYC millennial. Be sure to follow her at wtfrankie.

Vashtie Kola: (Vashtiekola)
Category: Artists

A New York based director, filmmaker, artist, designer, creative consultant and DJ, Vashtie Kola is truly a renaissance woman. Vashtie created the tomboy-meets-high fashion brand Violette which is housed in Paris’ popular Colette boutique and is available online. She is on snapchat as Vashtiekola and you can add her to get an inside perspective on the life of a New York City tastemaker.

Vivienne Gucwa: (Travelinglens)
Category: Photography

Since 2009 Vivienne has taken some of the most incredible photos of New York City. She has shared the landscapes, architecture and neighborhoods of New York City on her blog, Instagram and more. Now you can look through her camera lens on Snapchat as well by following Travelinglens!

Casey Neistat: (Caseyneistat)
Category: Vlogger

Regarded by many as the best YouTuber on the planet, he was one of the first people to amass a large (and engaging!) following on Snapchat. While Casey has started his own social media company, Beme, you can still find him on Snapchat pretty frequently. If you want to see behind the scenes of his day to day vlogging on Youtube then you need to add Caseyneistat on Snapchat.

Jose Tutiven: (Tutes)
Category: Photography

Jose is one of the most skilled photographers in New York City. Born in Ecuador and raised in the Bronx, he has been navigating the energetic streets of New York most of his life. From aerial helicopter views of Manhattan, to behind the scenes at the shorty awards, to his daily commentary around the city, Tutes is a great add on Snapchat.

Kevin Rose: (Hikrose)
Category: Entrepreneurs

The founder of Dig and former partner at Google Ventures recently moved to New York City to be the Chief Executive at New York-based startup Hodinkee. A company that merged with Watchville, a project out of Kevin’s new consumer app workshop, North Technologies. Experience the life a serial entrepreneur who just can’t help but create new things by following Hikrose.

Colleen Marie: (Colldoll29)
Category: Fashion

For a fashion fix with an artful mix you need to add yours truly Colldoll29 on Snapchat. An uptown NYC girl, but with an upstate girl next door heart, she started the fashion blog Colors of Colleen to share here passion about travel and adventures in style. Don’t miss the outfit of the day, her photoshoots around the city, or her artistic creations.

Sam Sheffer: (SamSheffer)
Category: Technology

Sam became a snapchat pro while running social media for The Verge. Now working as the Creative Producer at Mashable he gets an inside look at some of the latest technology out there. With Sam focusing on his Youtube Channel and Snapchat you will experience the streets of New York mostly while he is riding his electric longboard.

Adam Besvinick: (Besvinick)
Category: Entrepreneurs

Adam is the one the best hustlers in New York City. If you need further proof, Forbes recently named him to their 30 Under 30 list for his work Venture Capital investing in startups. He also shares some of the most important lessons from the startup world at his Ventureminded.me blog. Follow Besvinick to get an inside look at the NYC startup world from Adam’s perspective.

Rebecca Minkoff: (Rebeccaminkoff)
Category: Brands

Years ago, New York-based fashion brand Rebecca Minkoff began using Snapchat behind the scenes at it’s spring 2014 Runway show giving people an exclusive early look. Since Rebecca started two years ago her brand of the same name has created the playbook for how brands can use snapchat to their advantage.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.