I am working on this issue. As a mortgage broker with a firm which will shortly become a correspondent lender, we will be able to service loans for 4 months under the current law. My goal is to convince our owners to let me develop a plan to allow payments to be made with credit cards during the period of time we retain servicing rights if we can work things out to keep the ultimate loan buyers OK with the plan.

The biggest issue out there with credit cards is Fannie Mae. This is the reason why only $1,000 or less of the closing costs can be paid by credit card - it's a Fannie Mae rule. They don't want to see borrowers with revolving credit (already factored into the credit decision) run the debt up even more by allowing the payments to be financed (and the risk of borrowers compounding their mortgage payments by moving one fixed-payment debt into a revolving-payment debt). It's easy to see the risk of a borrower getting into big trouble. Because almost all conforming loans are bought by Fannie Mae, all lenders and brokers must abide by their rules, otherwise you end up stuck with a loan that you can't sell to them. They don't understand or care about frequent flyer miles or incentives - they only look at the risk of a borrower using the card to increase their debt by financing the payments and increasing the risk of default.

I can't promise to make this program happen, but I can tell everyone that it is a priority for me once we are a lender and can self-service loans.

In the meantime, I am putting the finishing touches on some really innovative programs to allow borrowers to earn miles or other travel incentives when financing - something totally different than the overpriced cookie-cutter loans being peddled by lending tree. I will see if Randy will be willing to allow the information to be posted on his site after a review. I should be ready with those programs within a few weeks.