Houses and Cats in Russian Tradition

For centuries Russians consider letting a cat into a new house before the humans move in as a sign of good luck.

They guarded Hermitage Museum and had their own servants and even after the October revolution they were looked after.

Few years ago the largest bank in Russia, Sberbank, was giving free cats to mortgage customers for good luck in their new homes.

According to Russian superstition, letting a cat walk through your new home before you move in brings good luck. “Order a cat for your housewarming, and bring happiness and luck to your home,” the state-controlled bank says on a special Cat Delivery Service website it set up to promote the campaign. Customers can choose among 10 breeds, including tabbies, Siamese, and an exotic hairless cat resembling a sphinx.

Russia's largest bank is apparently loaning cats to clients who buy one of their mortgage products - as a sign of good luck.

In what has all the marks of a publicity stunt, Sberbank - one of Russia's largest banks - says every new mortgage customer can choose the cat they want, and it will be delivered in time for their housewarming party.  The bank's gives a choice of 10 breeds, and features a video showing the first happy clients receiving their cats. It's an advertising campaign thought up by a local agency, and reportedly features delivery vans with cat logos cruising the streets of Moscow.

The bad news for customers is that they won't be able to keep their feline. Terms of the offer say that the animal is only given so that it is the first to cross the threshold of the property - many Russians say a cat is sign of good luck to those moving into a new home - and is only available for two hours so the home-owners can take photos.

The cats are owned by individuals, including Sberbank employees, “who agreed to let their pets participate in special projects,” Anastasia Vakhlamova, a bank spokeswoman, told Bloomberg Businessweek. The bank started receiving requests for loaner cats “immediately after the launch of the special project” in mid-August 2014.

Cats were always a part of  life, because back in a day people of Russia mostly lived in villages, and every house had a cat simply as anti-mouse remedy. 

The only real "cat tradition" is letting it into a new house before the humans move in, and there are about 4 versions of how that tradition came to us. 

The most common belief is that cat is a spiritual animal, and it can feel good and bad energy, so, for example, the spot in a new house where cat decided to lie down for the first time needs to be a spot for a bed, and places the cat didn't like should be avoided. 

And a black cat crossing person's pass is still considered a sign of bad luck in Russia as well as many other countries. 

Bond Lake, Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada

Aurora's History

After the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961, mounting fears of the city of Toronto falling under attack were at an all-time high.

By January of the next year, the city had a fully operational secret bunker built more than 50 kilometers away in northern Aurora, its whereabouts known only to a select few.

The Metropolitan Toronto Emergency Preparedness Center was meant to be a site where city officials would meet to plan the next steps in the event of an attack. But decades passed and the center was never put to the test.

The farmhouse was at times used as an office space, often with a single employee working in solitude. It later served as a training facility for the Toronto Police Service.

The city decided in 1992 it could no longer justify the high costs of maintaining the site. It put the property up for sale and, while offers flooded in, it was four years until the city approved an offer.

Under this Aurora home lies a historic bunker from the Cold War era.

An expansive shelter fortified by concrete and steel. Immediately noticeable were the three towering boards at the end of the room displaying intricately hand-drawn maps of the GTA and southern Ontario.

Military bases like Camp Borden in Simcoe County were clearly marked. And lists ready to be filled with the numbers of casualties and radiation levels in different sites lined the walls of the room, conjuring haunting images of wartime.

Heritage site

The Town of Aurora has afforded some protection to the house, registering it as a site of cultural and historical significance, but the town's Director of Planning and Development Marco Ramunno says that designation doesn't involve maintaining the property.

"Because it's on a register, if an owner wanted to demolish it or change the structure significantly, they would need to approach the town and submit a heritage permit," Ramunno said. He added that the town would likely intervene if there were any plans to destroy the bunker.

What you need to earn to buy a house in Toronto in 2016

According to the Canadian Real Estate Association (the CREA), the average price in Canada is currently $480,743, an amount that changes from region to region.

To calculate an estimated gross income required, you need the purchase price, down payment, interest rate, estimated property taxes, and a minimum of $100 a month for heating costs. Other utilities are not factored in by lending banks,we used a 2.49% interest rate (based on a 120-day rate hold. This is the average qualifying rate for a 5-year fixed term), and a down payment of 10% of the purchase price.

Other factors that are included with mortgage qualification are the total monthly payment obligations from credit cards, LOC’s, personal and car loans, car leases, and other types of credit that require a monthly payment.

The CREA’s prices below take into account all residential properties, including detached, semi-detached, townhouse/row houses, apartment units, cottages, duplexes, and triplexes. Median salary information comes from Statistics Canada’s 2014 Metropolitan Area Census, the most recent look at salaries across the country. Numbers are rounded to the nearest dollar, and all property tax figures should be considered rough estimates.

Toronto

• Average price: $709,825
• Monthly mortgage payment: $2,927
• Monthly property tax: $406
• Income required: $128,746
• Median family income: $75,270

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

The Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), commonly known as Fannie Mae, is a government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) and, since 1968, a publicly traded company.

Founded in 1938 during the Great Depression as part of the New Deal,the corporation's purpose is to expand the secondary mortgage market by securitizing mortgages in the form of mortgage-backed securities (MBS),allowing lenders to reinvest their assets into more lending and in effect increasing the number of lenders in the mortgage market by reducing the reliance on locally based savings and loan associations (or "thrifts"). Its brother organization is the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), better known as Freddie Mac.

Fannie Mae headquarters at 3900 Wisconsin Avenue, NW in Washington, D.C.

Type	Government-sponsored enterprise and public company
Traded as	OTCQB: FNMA
Industry	Financial services
Founded	1938; 78 years ago
Headquarters	Washington, D.C., U.S.
Key people	Tim Mayopoulos, CEO
Products	Diversified investments
Revenue	US$ 25.8 billion (2014)
Net income	US$ 14.2 billion (2014)
Total assets	US$ 3.248 trillion (2014)
Total equity	US$ 3.7 billion (2014)
Number of employees	7,200 (2013)
Website	www.fanniemae.com

 The Great Depression wrought havoc on the U.S. housing market. By 1933, an estimated 20-25% of the nation's outstanding mortgage debt was in default. Fannie Mae was established in 1938 by amendments to the National Housing Actas part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal.

Originally chartered as the National Mortgage Association of Washington, the organization's explicit purpose was to provide local banks with federal money to finance home mortgages in an attempt to raise levels of home ownership and the availability of affordable housing.

Fannie Mae created a liquid secondary mortgage market and thereby made it possible for banks and other loan originators to issue more housing loans, primarily by buying Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured mortgages. For the first thirty years following its inception, Fannie Mae held a monopoly over the secondary mortgage market.

 Other considerations may have motivated the New Deal focus on the housing market: about a third of the nation's unemployed were in the building trade, and the government had a vested interest in getting them back to work by giving them homes to build.

Fannie Mae was acquired by the Housing and Home Finance Agency from the Federal Loan Agency as a constituent unit in 1950. In 1954, an amendment known as the Federal National Mortgage Association Charter Act made Fannie Mae into "mixed-ownership corporation" meaning that federal government held the preferred stock while private investors held the common stock; in 1968 it converted to a privately held corporation, to remove its activity and debt from the federal budget. In the 1968 change, arising from the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, Fannie Mae's predecessor (also called Fannie Mae) was split into the current Fannie Mae and the Government National Mortgage Association ("Ginnie Mae").

In 1970, the federal government authorized Fannie Mae to purchase conventional mortgages, the same year it went public on New York and Pacific Exchanges.

In 1981, Fannie Mae issued its first mortgage pass through and called it a mortgage-backed security. The Fannie Mae laws did not require the Banks to hand out subprime loans in any way.

Ginnie Mae had guaranteed the first mortgage pass through security of an approved lender in 1968 and in 1971 Freddie Mac issued its first mortgage pass through, called a participation certificate, composed primarily of private mortgages.

 In 1999, Fannie Mae came under pressure from the Clinton administration to expand mortgage loans to low and moderate income borrowers by increasing the ratios of their loan portfolios in distressed inner city areas.

Additionally, institutions in the primary mortgage market pressed Fannie Mae to ease credit requirements on the mortgages it was willing to purchase, enabling them to make loans to subprime borrowers at interest rates higher than conventional loans.

House Price Index - HPI

A House Price Index (HPI) measures the price changes of residential housing. Methodologies commonly used to calculate HPI are the hedonic regression (HR), simple moving average (SMA) and repeat-sales regression (RSR).

The HPI was developed in conjunction with OFHEO's (now FHFA) responsibilities as a regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It is used to measure the adequacy of their capital against the value of their assets, which are primarily home mortgages.

In Canada, the New Housing Price Index is calculated monthly by Statistics Canada. Additionally, a resale house price index is also maintained by the Canadian Real Estate Association, based on reported sale prices submitted by real estate agents, and averaged by region. In December 2008, the private National Bank and the information technology firm Teranet began a separate monthly house price index based on resale prices of individual single-family houses in selected metropolitan areas, using a methodology similar to the Case-Shiller index and based on actual sale prices taken from government land registry databases. This allows Teranet and the National Bank to track prices without allowing periods of high sales in one city to push up the national average. The National Bank also operates a forward market on Canadian housing prices.

Hedonic Regression(HR)

 In economics, hedonic regression or hedonic demand theory is a revealed preference method of estimating demand or value. It decomposes the item being researched into its constituent characteristics, and obtains estimates of the contributory value of each characteristic. 

In real estate economics, hedonic pricing is used to adjust for the problems associated with researching a good that is as heterogeneous as buildings. Because buildings are so different, it is difficult to estimate the demand for buildings generically. Instead, it is assumed that a house can be decomposed into characteristics such as number of bedrooms, size of lot, or distance to the city center. 

A hedonic regression equation treats these attributes (or bundles of attributes) separately, and estimates prices (in the case of an additive model) or elasticity (in the case of a log model) for each of them. This information can be used to construct a price index that can be used to compare the price of housing in different cities, or to do time series analysis. 

As with CPI calculations, hedonic pricing can be used to correct for quality changes in constructing a housing price index. It can also be used to assess the value of a property, in the absence of specific market transaction data. It can also be used to analyze the demand for various housing characteristics, and housing demand in general. It has also been used to test assumptions in spatial economics. 

Hedonic models are commonly used in tax assessment, litigation, academic studies, and other mass appraisal projects

Simple Moving Average (SMA)

In statistics, a moving average (rolling average or running average) is a calculation to analyze data points by creating series of averages of different subsets of the full data set. It is also called a moving mean (MM) or rolling mean and is a type of finite impulse response filter. Variations include: simple, and cumulative, or weighted forms

In financial applications a simple moving average (SMA) is the unweighted mean of the previous n data. However, in science and engineering the mean is normally taken from an equal number of data on either side of a central value.

If those prices are ${\displaystyle p_{M},p_{M-1},\dots ,p_{M-(n-1)}}$ then the formula is

${\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}SMA&={\frac {p_{M}+p_{M-1}+\cdots +p_{M-(n-1)}}{n}}\\&={\frac {1}{n}}\sum _{i=0}^{n-1}p_{M-i}\end{aligned}}}$

When calculating successive values, a new value comes into the sum and an old value drops out, meaning a full summation each time is unnecessary for this simple case,

${\displaystyle {\textit {SMA}}_{\mathrm {today} }={\textit {SMA}}_{\mathrm {yesterday} }+{p_{M} \over n}-{p_{M-n} \over n}}$

 Repeat Sales Regression (RSR)

Perhaps the most well-known housing index that uses the repeat-sales method is the Case-Shiller Index, which measures changes in house prices. It excludes new construction, condos and co-ops. It also excludes non-arms-length transactions, such as home sales between family members at below-market prices. It does include foreclosure sales. 

Other indexes that use the repeat-sales method are the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s monthly House Price Index, which is based on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s data on single-family home sale prices and refinance appraisals; and Core Logic’s Loan Performance 

Home Price Index, which covers a broader geographic area than the Case-Shiller or FHFA indexes. Canada’s major home price index, the National Composite House Price Index, uses the repeat-sales method, too. Indexes such as these typically report changes in home prices from the previous month, quarter and year. Increasing home prices indicate increasing demand, while decreasing prices indicate decreasing demand.

An advantage of repeat-sales methods is that they calculate changes in home prices based on sales of the same property, so they avoid the problem of trying to account for price differences in homes with varying characteristics. Repeat-sales methods also offer a more accurate alternative to regression analysis or to calculating average sales price by geographic area. A shortcoming of repeat-sales methods is that they don’t account for homes that were sold only once during the reported time period.

Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO)

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) was an agency within the Department of Housing and Urban Development of the United States of America. It was charged with ensuring the capital adequacy and financial safety and soundness of two government sponsored enterprises—the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac). It was established by the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992.

OFHEO was managed by a Director, appointed by the President and ratified by the Senate.

FHFA/OFHEO

The US Federal Housing Finance Agency (formerly Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight a.k.a. OFHEO) publishes the HPI inx, a quarterly broad measure of the movement of single-family house prices.

Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) 

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is an independent federal agency created as the successor regulatory agency resulting from the statutory merger of the Federal Housing Finance Board (FHFB), the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development government-sponsored enterprise mission team, absorbing the powers and regulatory authority of both entities, with expanded legal and regulatory authority, including the ability to place government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) into receivership or conservatorship.

In its role as regulator, it regulates Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the 11 Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBanks, or FHLBank System). It is wholly separate from the Federal Housing Administration, which largely provides mortgage insurance.

Check Your Credit Report

Everyone who's ever borrowed money to buy a car or a house or applied for a credit card or any other personal loan has a credit file.
Because we love to borrow money, that means almost every adult Canadian has a credit file. More than 21 million of us have credit reports. And most of us have no idea what's in them.

Are there mistakes? Have you been denied credit and don't know why? Is someone trying to steal your identity? A simple check of your credit report will probably answer all those questions. And it's free for the asking.

What's in a credit report?

 Each of the accounts includes a notation that includes a letter and a number. The letter "R" refers to a revolving debt, while the letter "I" stands for an instalment account. The numbers go from 0 (too new to rate) to 9 (bad debt or placed for collection or bankruptcy.) For a revolving account, an R1 rating is the notation to have. That means you pay your bills within 30 days, or "as agreed."

What is a credit score?

A credit rating or score (also called a Beacon or a FICO score) is not part of a regular credit report. Basically, it's a mathematical formula that translates the data in the credit report into a three-digit number that lenders use to make credit decisions. 

 The numbers go from 300 to 900. The higher the number, the better. For example, a number of 750 to 799 is shared by 27 per cent of the population. Statistics show that only two per cent of the borrowers in this category will default on a loan or go bankrupt in the next two years. That means that anyone with this score is very likely to get that loan or mortgage they've applied for.

 

How to get a copy of your credit report and credit score?

There are two national credit bureaus in Canada: Equifax Canada and TransUnion Canada. 

 For TransUnion, the instructions to get a free credit report by mail are available at:

https://www.transunion.ca/personal/credit-report

For Equifax, the instructions are at:

https://help-en.equifax.ca/app/answers/detail/a_id/300/noIntercept/1