EL SEGUNDO HERALD May 18, 2017 Page 17 Finance How PMI Can Make Your Dream Of Home Sweet Home A Reality (BPT) - In the 2017 housing market, those who choose to pursue the dream of owning a home face several important decisions, such as how much to put toward a down payment. Twenty percent down is typically recommended by most lenders. While 20 percent is not a requirement, paying less can have a big impact on the amount you pay monthly. It is important for home buyers to know that when seeking a conventional loan with less than 20 percent down of the sales price or appraised value of the home, lenders will often require Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI). This article takes a deeper look at PMI by answering the most common questions on the topic. What is PMI? PMI is a type of mortgage insurance. Like most other types of mortgage insurance, it protects the lender in the event the borrower is unable to repay the remainder of the loan. In many cases, PMI is required on conventional loans when the buyer has a down payment of less than 20 percent. Some lenders may offer conventional loans that require a smaller down payment without PMI, but the tradeoff can typically be a higher interest rate. How does PMI affect your loan? PMI can affect your loan in several different ways depending on the loan type and the lender. In some cases, the PMI will be required in a lump sum at the time of closing. This PMI payment type is called an upfront premium. Other PMI plans call for monthly payments where the total value of the PMI is divided and factored into your monthly mortgage payments. The PMI can generally be cancelled under certain conditions once 20 percent of the amount borrowed has been reduced from the principal balance, or amount borrowed. Finally, the lender may also opt for a plan that requires both upfront and monthly PMI payments. In this case a portion of the PMI is paid at the time of closing, and then the remaining PMI is paid as part of the monthly mortgage payment. Alternatives to PMI Some government-backed loans offer alternative options to buyers paying less than 20 percent down on a home loan. There are several of these loans and each has a different approach to handling down payments and mortgage insurance. By being educated on the different types of loans you will have an easier time finding which best suits your needs. Learning more about PMI While PMI is an additional fee, it helps those with less than a 20 percent down payment realize their dreams of home ownership. To learn more about financing options that can make your dreams of homeownership a reality, visit VMFhomeloan.com. NMLS Disclosure Vanderbilt Mortgage and Finance, Inc., 500 Alcoa Trail, Maryville, TN 37804, 865-380-3000, NMLS #1561, (http://www. nmlsconsumeraccess.org/), AZ Lic. #BK- 0902616, Loans made or arranged pursuant to a California Finance Lenders Law license, GA Residential Mortgage (Lic. #6911), Illinois Residential Mortgage Licensee, Licensed by the NH Banking Department, MT Lic. #1561, Licensed by PA Dept. of Banking. • Looking Up Surprise! When a Dwarf Star Is Really a Planet Press Release from Carnegie Institution for Science, Provided by Bob Eklund Sometimes a brown dwarf is actually a planet—or planet-like anyway. A team led by Carnegie’s Jonathan Gagné, and including researchers from the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) at Université de Montréal, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), and University of California San Diego, discovered that what astronomers had previously thought was one of the closest brown dwarfs to our own Sun is in fact a planetary-mass object. Smaller than stars, but bigger than giant planets, brown dwarfs are too small to sustain the hydrogen fusion process that fuels stars and allows them to remain hot and bright for a long time. So after formation, brown dwarfs slowly cool down and contract over time. The contraction usually ends after a few hundred million years, although the cooling is continuous. “This means that the temperatures of brown dwarfs can range from as hot as stars to as cool as planets, depending on how old they are,” said the AMNH’s Jackie Faherty, a co-author on this discovery. The team determined that a well-studied object known as SIMP J013656.5+093347, or SIMP0136 for short, is a planetary like member of a 200-million-year-old group of stars called Carina-Near. Groups of similarly aged stars moving together through space are considered prime regions to search for free-floating planetary like objects, because they provide the only means of age-dating these cold and isolated worlds. Knowing the age, as well as the temperature, of a free-floating object like this is necessary to determine its mass. Gagné and the research team were able to demonstrate that at about 13 times the mass of Jupiter, SIMP0136 is right at the boundary that separates brown dwarf-like properties, primarily the short-lived burning of deuterium in the object’s core, from planet-like properties. Free-floating planetary-mass objects are valuable because they are very similar to gas giant exoplanets that orbit around stars, like our own solar system’s Jupiter or Saturn, but it is comparatively much easier to study their atmospheres. Observing the atmospheres of exoplanets found within distant star systems is challenging, because dim light emitted by those orbiting exoplanets is overwhelmed by the brightness of their host stars, which blinds the instruments that astronomers use to characterize an exoplanet’s atmospheres. “The implication that the well-known SIMP0136 is actually more planet-like than we previously thought will help us to better understand the atmospheres of giant planets and how they evolve,” Gagné said. They may be easier to study in great detail, but these free-floating worlds are still extremely hard to discover unless scientists spend a lot of time observing them at the telescope, because they can be located anywhere in the sky and they are very hard to tell apart from brown dwarfs or very small stars. For this reason, researchers have confirmed only a handful of free-floating planetary like objects so far. Étienne Artigau, co-author and leader of the original SIMP0136 discovery, added: “This newest addition to the very select club of free-floating planetary like objects is particularly remarkable, because we had already detected fast-evolving weather patterns on the surface of SIMP0136, back when we thought it was a brown dwarf.” • An artist’s conception of SIMP J013656.5+093347, or SIMP0136 for short, which the research team determined is a planetary like member of a 200-million-year-old group of stars called Carina-Near. Image is courtesy of NASA/JPL, slightly modified by Jonathan Gagné. Planning Commission from page 3 one lot] lot where someone can build a whole other house on the back of their lot… But I think if we allow everyone to maximize the construction of their R-1 lots, we’re not going to have the kind of community that we have today. I think that we need to preserve our R-1 atmosphere.” The ADU matter was first addressed at the Planning Commission’s March 9 meeting when a public hearing was held. At the time, City staff interpreted a new state law that took effect on January 1, 2017 to include garages as part of what municipalities had to allow to be converted into an ADU, aka granny flat. Faced with having to allow every single-family property in the R-1 zone to have or construct an ADU (an ADU has to have a separate entrance and cooking and bathing facilities) without requiring any additional parking (because the new state law says each property within a halfmile of public transit does not have to provide parking for an ADU and all of El Segundo’s R-1 zone properties are within a half-mile of public transit), the commissioners set about considering how to best deal with the law. At the March 23 meeting, City Planning Manager Gregg McClain indicated that during its research on the law, staff determined that at least four pending bills were, as he told the commissioners, “working independently to change the language in certain ways. One in particular adds clarity. It’s sort of a clarification bill. And in how they add the clarity, we feel that we may be saved from having to do garage conversions, which is a good thing. So, we want to study that a little longer and then we also want to sort of assess the likelihood that that bill would be approved. We have reason to believe it will be because I think all the cities are asking for that clarity.” McLain also told the Planning Commission that state agencies had “indicated implicitly that garages were included” prior to the introduction of a particular pending bill, calling that pending bill “a very, very welcome clarification if it goes through.” Then at the April 27 meeting, the third public hearing on ADUs, the Planning Commission heard from 13 members of the public and set about determining how to comply with the new law--in particular whether or not to allow detached new construction ADUs in addition to the statemandated conversions now open to existing homes and existing accessory structures in the city’s R-1 zone. As it stands, the ordinance the Planning Commission is passing on to City Council would only allow conversion of homes and existing accessory structures in the R-1 zone prior to January 1, 2017 to be converted to an ADU; prohibit garage conversion to an ADU; allow new additions attached to a house or garage to be an ADU; allow R-2 lots under 4,000 square feet to have ADUs; and release previous covenants on properties that had to agree to the covenant in order to have their ADU built. •
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