The bank (or other money lending financial institution) wants to make sure that you're healthy and live until the end of your mortgage. If you passed away or became critically ill/disabled, you couldn't work and make mortgage payments. The result would be foreclosure. This would make everyone's lives more difficult at the bank. They're in [...]
Take Me Back To "Things To Avoid In Japanese Real Estate, Part I". A Floorplan That Is Odd or Unusual Not every home is rectangular. Some have “eccentric” designers who design them to look like a shuriken, a sausage, or an eyeball. Are the toilets, or is the kitchen, in a disconcerting place? Are [...]
No one likes to be in debt. In a perfect world, we would pay off all our liabilities and own all of our possessions free and clear. Unfortunately, in the real world, many of us have debts, and a finite amount of money that cannot pay all of them off immediately. We must make choices [...]
LTV stands for “Loan-to-Value.” It is part of the phrase “Loan-to-Value Ratio.” LTV is often used when discussing mortgages, both for one’s home, and for investment property. It is a measure of how much the bank is willing to lend the real estate buyer relative to the price of the property. For example, if the [...]
DSCR stands for “Debt-Service Coverage Ratio.” It is a measure of the ratio of income (specifically, Net Operating Income) to debt (Total Debt Service). Investors will use this to work out what the margin of safety is between the expense of paying back the bank and the total rent they receive. What is DSCR used [...]
One of the fundamental differences between buying a home, and investing in real estate, is who pays the mortgage. In Japan because interest rates are low, the differential between a residential mortgage and an investment mortgage may only be 1%. Given that the residential mortgage is invariably the cheaper of the two, you could be [...]
You may have heard that it can be difficult for foreign residents of Japan to navigate the financial services industry here. From being denied credit cards, to not being able to sign up for life insurance, to banking; we have all heard stories about people being told that their signatures do not look -enough- like [...]