Business life: My finance news blog

More than 27,000 Floridians are expected to get restitution checks from Ameriquest Mortgage Co. as part of a nationwide settlement, state officials said Thursday.

The California-based company signed the settlement with 49 states and the District of Columbia, agreeing to provide $295 million in consumer restitution and to make sweeping reforms of practices that the states say amounted to predatory lending.

Checks are being mailed this week. Claims forms were sent to eligible consumers in July.

Affected Floridians will each receive about $780, according to the Florida Attorney General’s Office and the Office of Financial Regulation.

Under the settlement, consumers who opted to receive the restitution payments relinquished their right to file lawsuits related to the loans covered by the settlement.

However, consumers who participated in the settlement did not give up any claim they may otherwise raise if their home goes into foreclosure.

Florida had the second-largest number of claimants after California, which had 44,000 and ahead of Texas, which had 20,000.

Sandi Copes, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Bill McCollum’s office, said about 60 percent of those eligible responded to the state’s request for claims involving Ameriquest loans.

The 2006 settlement resolved allegations that Ameriquest and its affiliates misrepresented or did not adequately disclose the terms of home loans, such as whether a loan carried a fixed or an adjustable rate; charged excessive loan-origination fees and prepayment penalties; refinanced borrowers into improper or inappropriate loans; or improperly inflated appraisals used to qualify borrowers for loans.

The settlement included Ameriquest’s parent company, ACC Capital Holding Corp., with subsidiaries Town & Country Credit Corp online payday advance. –>. and AMC Mortgage Services Inc., formerly known as Bedford Home Loans.

Sourse

A Bush administration plan to help financially stretched US homeowners keep their homes calls for freezing interest rates on subprime mortgages for five years, news reports said Wednesday. President George W Bush was expected to unveil the plan Thursday as the US housing market slump enters a third year, slowing economic growth in the buildup to the November 2008 presidential election.

Rising mortgage defaults have rocked financial markets, caused billion of dollars in losses on securities backed by the home loans and pushed the crisis high onto the politcal agenda.

The plan proposes freezing interest rates on some subprime loans for five years and would widen the options for state and local governments to fund the refinancing of troubled mortgages, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Subprime loans, promoted by financial companies as a way for people with weak credit to buy homes, start out with low interest rates that rise after the first few years - the reason many homeowners are now struggling.

The Bush administration has negotiated with mortgage lenders and investors over ways to reverse the rise in home foreclosures, while avoiding a government bailout of investors who lost money in the crisis.

More than 30 per cent of subprime mortgage holders are behind on their payments, and Credit Suisse analysts say 775,000 homes with more than 143 billion dollars of mortgage debt will go into foreclosure in the next two years, Bloomberg News reported cash advance loans. Nearly twice as many US homes were foreclosed in October compared to a year earlier.

Sorse

From 2005 to 2006, Wells Fargo increased its total number of small business loans of $100,000 or less by 27 percent in Alaska, according to the latest Community Reinvestment Act data. Wells Fargo was the top small-business lender in Alaska, with 5,753 loans of $100,000 or less for a total of more than $151 million in 2006, a 20.6 percent increase in dollar volume over 2005. Wells Fargo is the top lender to small businesses in Alaska’s low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, with 620 loans of less than $100,000 for a total of $17.3 million, a 12 percent increase in dollar volume over 2005.

The national small-business lending market totaled $126 billion in 2006, with Wells Fargo holding steady as America’s top small-business lender for the fifth consecutive year http://easy-quick-payday-loans.com. With an 18 percent year-over-year increase in its 2006 lending, Wells Fargo extended $21 billion to small-business owners nationwide in loans of less than $100,000, according to the 2006 CRA data.

Body shop colors itself green

Driven Auto Body, 5011 Spenard Road, said it has received a Green Star Award. Green Star is a nonprofit organization that encourages businesses to practice waste reduction, energy conservation and pollution prevention. The body shop uses water-borne paints, which reduce toxins in comparison to other paints, and dries the paint using an air flow system rather than baking, which saves on energy. The painter is also exposed to fewer toxins. The shop has also instituted a recycling program that results in significant reduction of waste going to the city landfill. Driven Auto Body is owned by Kevin Stalder.

Sourse