During these times of national crisis so many people are in danger of loosing their homes that I’ve preempted my Green Chicago Blog posts to focus on helping as many people as I can keep their homes. You can’t have a Green Home if you don’t have a home.

If you are having trouble making your mortgage payments I’d like to see if I can help you. The recent taxpayer sponsored Bailout deal, officially called the Housing and Economic Recovery Act, included some provisions that allow an FHA approved Mortgage Banker like my company to refinance you out of foreclosure at a lower rate and with payments lower than you are struggling to pay now..

Until this bill was passed, many struggling homeowners were in a catch 22 situation. You may have made one or more late payments because they are higher than you can handle. If you could only refinance to today’s lower rates you could afford the lower payments… but you couldn’t because you couldn’t get a new loan approved because you started sending in the payments late. Until recently it was hard, if not impossible, to break out of this cycle.

Finally, our congressional leaders did something that made sense. The latest taxpayer sponsored Bailout deal, officially called the Housing and Economic Recovery Act, includes some provisions that allow an FHA approved Mortgage Banker like my company to refinance you out of foreclosure.

EVEN IF YOU ARE BEHIND ON YOUR PAYMENTS we can get most people approved and help you refinance your way to lower mortgage payments and SAVE YOUR HOME.

While I cannot honestly say that we can help everyone, it costs you nothing to talk to me about your situation and let me see if I can help.

If you want to lower your mortgage payments or save your home, click here, tell me your name, email address, phone if you prefer a call or want to reach me right away, and a brief description of your particular situation. I’ll get back to you as soon as I get your message.

If you know someone else who is struggling to make their mortgage payments - a friend, family member, co-worker, anyone - have him or her contact me for a free consultation. I don’t charge anything if I cannot help you. 

Aeroturbines Wind Turbines for the Urban Environment

The Aeroturbine is a wind turbine designed to work in an urban environment. It was invented by University of Illinois at Chicago Professor Bill Becker. Like many others before him, Professor Becker tried to use standard wind turbine designs in the urban environment of Chicago and found he got less than satisfactory results. He realized that was due to the difference between wind in the big city and wind in the corridors that work well for large scale traditional wind turbine designs.

Unlike wind corridors like the rural midwest where T. Boone Pickens and others are building large scale wind turbines, the wind blows in wild, turbulent ways within the wind canyons in a big city. It whips around, up and down buildings. He found that you can’t just stick a regular wind turbine design on top of a building in a big city and get the power output you are looking for. Even worse, there is sometimes a danger of a powerful gust tearing a blade off of the turbine and endangering one or more of your neighbors!

Professor Becker eventually came up with a design to handle wind hitting the turbine from any direction. It is an elegant design that looks somewhat like the double helix of DNA. The simple, elegant yet highly effective design is reminissent of those from one of the visionaries he(and I) admires most, R. Buckminster Fuller.

His blade design of caged rotors result in quiet, low vibration operation. They can be mounted vertically or horizontally and are stackable. Professor Becker expects the cost of his new turbines to decrease considerably once he has begun mass production of his designs.

http://www.aerotecture.com

People like Professor Becker will help America reduce it’s dependence on energy from foreign sources and keep more of our hard earned money right here at home. We will be following his progress and advise our readers when his turbines will become widely available to the public.

Energy costs are the thread that ties together the recent decline in housing values and the stock market. While many other factors, such as deficit spending, come into play here, expensive energy leads to slower economic growth. It is literally a drag on our economy.

Why have energy costs risen so much? A looming oil supply shortage and a weak dollar. Since the market always tries to get ahead of developments, the supply shortage does not have to be upon us, just over the horizon, in order for the market to start pricing the resource at a premium. A weak dollar, due primarily to debtor-nation level deficit speading, makes oil more expensive in a direct way. A weaker dollar has less buying power, so you have more dollars chasing the same quantity of goods, otherwise known as inflation.

A weak dollar also means bonds must yield an increasingly higher interest rate to compensate for currency losses if we are to get anyone to buy them. This pushes up mortgage rates, giving prospective home buyers less buying power. Lower rates mean more buying power meaning higher home values. Now, there were speculative excesses and a lack of underwriting standards that were a more direct cause of the housing collapse than interest rates alone. However, having rates drift higher makes it that much harder for us to get out of this mess.

So how can widespread adoption of ePowerHomes help? By reducing our nation’s energy consumption, adding value to the homes, and making homes more affordable at the same time. Much of the discussions on reducing our dependence on expensive foreign oil are about increasing auto mileage and switching more utilities to renewable energy production. I agree with and support these efforts. But we hear surprisingly little about measures we can take to reduce home energy consumption. A home that consumes 50% to 75% less energy than today’s typical home commands a higher price. It is also more affordable because the homeowner, even if paying %% to 10% more for the home, will save 50% to 70% or more on his utility bills. This can amount to a couple thousand dollars a year for many homeowners.

Reducing our nation’s energy consumption, along with adding more renweable and other energy from American will cause demand destruction in terms of consumption of imported energy. This will strengthen the dollar, lower interest rates and we’ll have a virtuous cycle were lower energy consumption keeps more money in our economy, which also decreases demand for imported oil, decreasing the price, or reducing the rate at which the price increases(due to a finite supply and demand from India and China), for the oil that we will still need to import.

Saving money and helping our economy can begin at home.