Fixed rate home equity loan – Important facts that you must not miss about this option

Guest Post Written By: Melissa Grace , Senior Editor,   Mortgagefit.com

Did you fall short of cash when you wanted to renovate your home or repay your high interest credit card debt? If you’re looking for a secured loan option that you can take resort to whenever you fall short of cash, taking out a fixed rate home equity loans may be considered. This is one of the most inexpensive ways of borrowing money and using it for various financial purposes. In the present market conditions, taking out a fixed rate home equity loan is perhaps the best way to guard you from sudden rise in the interest rates of personal loans. Since the credit downgrade, there have been predictions that the interest rate will rise on all personal loans and therefore, if you’ve accumulated enough equity in your home, you’re lucky enough in this market situation. Read on to know more on such loans.

What are fixed rate home equity loans?

This particular lending option is for the cash-strapped but house-rich people who want to repay their debt obligations without having to take out any unsecured loan. When you take out a mortgage loan and start repaying the loan, the amount that you pay back is the equity in your home, which is rather the amount that you owe on your home. There are two types of home equity loans, fixed rate loans and home equity lines of credit. The fixed rate loan is a single lump sum payment that is made to the borrower and repaid over a fixed period of time with an interest rate that is agreed-upon. The monthly payments and the interest rates will remain same throughout the term of the loan.

What are the benefits that the consumers may get by taking out home equity loans?

Home equity loans are an effortless way of getting access to immediate cash. You must be aware of the fact that the interest rates on the home equity loan are much higher than that of a first mortgage loan but when compared to that of the credit cards, they are much lower. If you have accrued a huge amount of debt on your credit cards, you can take out a home equity loan and consolidate all your high interest debts within the loan. The repayment term will be longer and you can also get tax-breaks on the interest rate that you pay on a home equity loan.

Are there any pitfalls of taking out home equity loans?

Well, as such there are no such pitfalls of using home equity loans for repaying your high interest debt or renovating your house, but the only important thing that you need to remember is to make timely payments on your loan. As your house will be used as collateral, you will require remaining very careful about defaulting on the loans as slight carelessness may lead to a foreclosure.

Therefore, if you’re someone who is in need of immediate cash and you’ve accumulated enough equity in your home, you can take out a fixed rate home equity loan. Make timely payments on the loans so that you forestall losing your home to a foreclosure.

Operational Risk Identification

This phase is to identify and structure the operational risks that ultimately will be presented in support of hazard mapping.

There are several approaches to achieve this result.

* Approach the process: it is made from the process mapping an inventory of the various operational risks associated with tasks that make up these processes. For this, an analysis is required on the inputs, the transformation process and outputs delivered to the end of each process.
* Approach the interview operational: this process allows questionnaires from pre-established list the operational risks identified by the business as those who actually or potentially affect their operations.

Whatever the approach used to identify risks, it should be complemented by a comparison with a benchmark sector wise operational risk.

The result of this work should be formalized in a holder who submits a mapping type of process risks.

The risk assessment
From the operational risks established, it should conduct an assessment of risks. For this, a definition of criteria for risk assessment should be performed to objectify the evaluation process.

Observation of practices established in this field identifies the following criteria:

* Severity: is the maximum impact of the exposure or potential exposure to risk situations. This is the concept of gross exposure.
* Detection / Management: This is the company's ability to identify and respond to risk events. This is the concept of risk management device.
* Occurrence: This is the probability of occurrence of risk situations. This is the concept of frequency of events. To determine this probability should identify incidents occurring over the period and form the basis of historical intervene in the decision process.

In summary, the assessment of operational risk should be against these criteria, completed the evaluation of residual risk for the net risk.

This evaluation process of operational risk should be integrated as a milestone and indispensable in the process of establishment of the life cycle of projects and products.

Risk Monitoring

This phase is the establishment of a monitoring and control of the risk profile of the company. It starts with the determination of the tolerable level of risk for the company. This tolerance is defined not only in terms of maximum risk but also in terms of risk atypical. Of course, the threshold defined by the company must be a regular challenge to ensure its relevance to the evolution of endogenous factors (trade policy, training ...) and exogenous (regulation, competition ...).

The monitoring device as defined by the company and driven by the risk management objectives are to:

* Increase the visibility of the risks;
* Better organize and improve processes;
* Preserve the results or business performance;
* Optimize the load management;
* Assign more effectively equity.

To achieve these objectives, the company has a network of "corresponding risk" in charge of a "portfolio risk" associated with the activities. This will be for this team:

* Implement the actions for the detection of risk (term limits ...)
* To analyze the causal factors of risk events (no audit clauses in contracts ...)
* Ensure the implementation of corrective actions and the definition of operational contingency plans (follow the recommendations ...).

To complement this, it is necessary to define indicators for the management of major risks that may be presented to all levels of the company (management, legislative and executive).

These sets of provisions are the minimum needed to ensure accountability, awareness and training of stakeholders on issues of risk.

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The Operational Risk Management

Despite the strengthening of regulations on risk management in recent years, the banking sector could not avoid. Subprime crisis, which by contagion has affected the rest of the economy, has highlighted the fragility of the various devices to control risks in force in the financial institutions, rating agencies and supervisors of financial markets. This weakness was also reflected in internal fraud which cost Society General 4.9 billion Euros.

It follows from these two major events the observation that the advent and implementation of new regulations do not allow companies to be fully exempt from risk factors to the origin of these losses. Indeed, recent actions by U.S. authorities to strengthen the financial sector by extending the powers of the Federal Reserve Bank and the European ideas and initiatives can only be effective if the various players take full ownership of their system risk management.

Appropriating the device operational risk management is putting in place a structured approach marked by a number of essential steps which include:

This is to define a framework that sets out the principles and rules of the potential risks have been shown to affect the company (benchmarks, risk governance committee ...). Indeed, the different activities and policies initiated by the company to expose operational risks can generate losses. These risks can be understood only with the establishment of a true corporate culture. The policy of operational risk management is the first step of this investment after the definition of its risk profile. It must be in perfect harmony with the various regulations, including Basel II, which involves the establishment of a regulatory monitoring for a regular update of this policy.

Finally the definition of a policy of operational risk management must be built in the same priority as commercial actions to prevent deterioration in the performance of the company.

Operational Efficiency Maximization

The search for sources of operational efficiency is generally only addressed through the analysis process. This approach is now well understood by operational staff. It also allows you to link to the Planning of IS which is also based on the description of the process.

This approach processes seek to identify redundancies, gaps, points of blocks. However, the search for sources of operational efficiency should also focus on service delivery to customers, whether operational or project: What are the services provided to date? What are the extensions of the scope that would significantly enhance service delivery and to benefit a greater number of actors (for example by integrating an operation today at the expense of clients)?

We also seek activities that have a characteristic position in relation to the concentrations of three assets:

* Information:
o dealer or a producer of information (focus information)
o interface or distributor of key information (broker positioning information)
* Means:
o holds a treatment capacity of computer or human (average concentration)
* Expertise:
o special expertise (concentration of expertise)


The presence of one of these assets is not enough to be a center of operational efficiency. However, from a couple of them, it will then be possible to change the activity to achieve a complete positioning. For example, concentrations are repositories of information. Develop the application infrastructure to manage this information and strengthen the expertise associated will then disseminate information on a larger scale and with better quality. This significantly raise the value added of the activity management repositories. This concentration of information and make changes to this perspective, therefore this activity subject to the establishment of a center of operational efficiency.

Another complementary approach is possible and easily accessible: mapping generic opportunities for sharing and industrialization will most frequently be used to initiate the search for sources of operational efficiency. This will be considered first and best practices in the sector and identify whether the existing organization is likely to reap the gains quickly.

The development of operational efficiency

The development of operational efficiency is a major concern of the major banking groups. This translates into at the moment through the consolidation of existing services in unique organizational entities in the Group. The aim is to reduce costs while improving the consistency, quality services and ultimately increase the operational efficiency of the entire organization.

However, the real centers of specialized operational efficiency (making the concentration of the three asset expertise, information and resources on a given field of activity) are not yet implemented only in a very ad hoc.
To develop such centers of operational efficiency, it is first necessary to identify relevant activities to concentrate in these clusters, so that they can then grow in terms of gains expertise, knowledge, productivity. Allowing them to have a real impact on the operational effectiveness of the Bank's medium term.



The establishment of centers of operational efficiency can significantly increase the operational efficiency of the entire Bank and facilitate response to the need for continuous development (see previous article in this blog). However, we must first identify the activities that could constitute sources of operational efficiency.

As we mentioned above, will be sought primarily in activities that allow centralization of three assets: information, expertise and resources. Joint ownership of these three assets pave the way for a wider range of services on the perimeter of activity. This offer will consist of both services 'operational' and services for projects. The problem is then to identify and evaluate the essential features of the future organization activities among distributed so far among multiple services or multiple entities.

Poles Of Operational Efficiency

Reduce the complexity of the development process: the poles of operational efficiency offer a range of services already in operation that are available to any entity by changing its processes. They are also available for personal service and dedicated to the support of development projects of other entities.
Increase and ensure quality of service: the service being delivered by a single entity, it will necessarily become generic, a common service level, so that gains of scale is generated. The range of services will be standardized at a level of quality and availability corresponding to the highest common denominator of user needs and guaranteed service agreements.
Reduce the overall cost of service delivery involved: the production cost of the service may be reduced by centralizing certain ways. However, changes will be especially noticeable in the final cost of use for each entity.
Increase the scope of use by allowing new entities to access the range of services: entities whose size did not develop these services in-house entities that had a similar service but with fewer resources and little adapted ...
Maintain the consistency and quality of information: the centralization of information management on a particular area will help to oversee the entire process of managing this information. It also allows perceiving the diversity of uses and coordinating accordingly.
Manage the evolution continues in a consistent manner on the different scope of responsibility of the poles: being at the heart of development projects and in contact with all clients on the perimeter, they are aware of the multiplicity of needs and include it in the trajectories of change in their activities.

Governance and Management of Operational Efficiency

To ensure consistency of objectives and day to day 
developments, it is necessary to develop a unique control of the entire work area operationally and in terms of its development (projects). Cells respond directly support the daily needs of internal customers will be directly attached to the same manager as the study of cell changes (service projects) and project management.
Besides coordination facilitated the centralization of information on operational activity will also provide indicators for monitoring the activity complete and advanced.
The establishment of centers contributing to the development of operational efficiency of the organization

The division of operational efficiency can significantly increase the operational efficiency of any Bank by reducing the complexity of the process, facilitating the evolution of organizations, reducing the overall cost of the activity level of service or greater .
This structure also facilitates the response to the need for continuous development [1], ensuring consistency in its scope, and contributing directly to facilitate the work of projects and developments of its clients through its dedicated service and expertise.

For the pole reaches these goals, it will first identify the activities conducive to a centralized asset value and define the services 'operational' and 'projects' to enlist the broader scope of users. The identification, definition, implementation and establishment of the trajectory of evolution of the cluster operational efficiency will require to use an approach to take into account all the dimensions (budget, governance, expertise, information, human resources, IT etc.

The Division of Operational Efficiency

The division of operational efficiency based on a concentration of three assets that are the information, expertise and resources. Only structures to achieve the concentration of these three assets are likely to be centers of operational efficiency in its own right.
Vis-à-vis the information, the division will have a role as manager, owner or clearing house (broker). It therefore has a good command of a large set of information and / or complex, which will provide added value to share with its customers.

Developing the Sources of Operational Efficiency

The establishment of centers of operational efficiency can significantly increase the operational efficiency of the entire Bank and facilitate response to the need for continuous development . However, we must first identify the activities that could constitute sources of operational efficiency. As we mentioned above, will be sought primarily in activities that allow centralization of three assets: information, expertise and resources. Joint ownership of these three assets pave the way for a wider range of services on the perimeter of activity. This offer will consist of both services 'operational' and services for projects.

The problem is then to identify and evaluate the essential features of the future organization activities among distributed so far among multiple services or multiple entities. The search for sources of operational efficiency is generally only addressed through the analysis process. This approach is now well understood by operational staff. It also allows you to link to the Planning of IS which is also based on the description of the process.

This approach processes seek to identify redundancies, gaps, points of blocks. However, the search for sources of operational efficiency should also focus on service delivery to customers, whether operational or project: What are the services provided to date? What are the extensions of the scope that would significantly enhance service delivery and to benefit a greater number of actors?

Objectives Of Operational Efficiency

The division of operational efficiency is also involved in coordinating and facilitating changes in the scope of activity which he is responsible.

* Operational mission: deliver in-house or external service
o Shared: used by all clients (which requires a sufficient level of both standardization and adaptability to customer needs)
o Quality: ensuring a high level of service,
o Integrated: consistent with the possible developments and other services (the same principles or standards, consistency of information ...).
* Strategic Missions: alignment with corporate goals
o In terms of scope of activity: both operational manager of the service and project management strategy on the field, defining the principles and standards of practice and evolution,
o In terms of process, users of these services: the service of development projects for the integration of services,
o Financial issues: cost reduction in service level or above.

The establishment of centers of operational efficiency should facilitate changes by developing the flexibility of the organization. This distinguishes them from the pooling of services that do not necessarily generate earnings in excess of centralization of the means.
In terms of implementation, the creation of a center of operational efficiency is not in the pooling of existing services but rather to develop an internal provider with a service offering clean.
Key features of the poles of operational efficiency

To effectively perform its duties, the division of operational efficiency will:

* Involve activities for which it is actually possible to concentrate three types of assets: the expertise, resources and information,
* Be resolutely turned towards the customers either returning customers or projects of development,
* Be provided with a governance and management processes adapted.