Friday's Personal Finance stories

It's extremely difficult to put a positive face on the housing market these days. From rising foreclosures and delinquencies to slumping sales, to curtailed mortgage lending -- especially the crunch on jumbo mortgages -- the data each month have been relentlessly downbeat.

The bad news has extended to home prices, which look like they are falling at a record pace. But home-price data may be one area where the disaster isn't all it's cracked up to be: Even the providers of this information are admitting that the peculiar real-estate market we're in opens the data to some twisted interpretations.

One popular measure of home prices, the Case-Shiller index, only includes the top 20 U.S. markets, many of which experienced rapidly rising prices and now are seeing the inevitable crash on the other side, and so may be skewing the numbers down. Broader-based data from the National Association of Realtors also have a major flaw: They doesn't account for the changing mix of homes being sold, thus skewing the data lower when the mix is mostly inexpensive houses.

In our lead story, Shades of Green writer Chris Pummer examines the home-price data and explains why you should be wary. Read his column, plus check out assistant Personal Finance editor Andrea Coombes' Consumer Watch column for a warning about how marketers and fraudsters are seeking to seize upon your tax-stimulus rebate checks and see why Chuck Jaffe is calling an investment in New York State quarters a stupid idea, on Friday's Personal Finance pages.

Even if the home-price data are overstating the magnitude of declines, you shouldn't take that to mean the market is healthy. The direction is clearly down -- maybe just not so far down.

-- Steve Kerch, assistant managing editor/personal finance

REAL ESTATE

Market anomalies skew home-price data, providers agree

Commonly cited measures of U.S. home prices are overstating the degree to which the vast majority of Americans' home values have declined in the last year, producers of two of the most widely tracked indexes acknowledged this week.
See Shades of Green.

There is no template for mortgage trouble

I am one of those "troubled" borrowers who is not yet delinquent on my loan but am in the process of writing my lender for a write-down on the principal and a fixed interest rate. Can you provide me with a sample letter or template to assist me with this task?
See Realty Q&A.

Multibillion-dollar bill to help homeowners advances

Members of the House Financial Services Committee voted to approve a multibillion-dollar package to aid strapped homeowners, sending the measure to the full House for consideration.
See full story.

Accidental renters

The housing slump has created another type of pain: the suffering of people who find themselves navigating a tight rental market after losing their home to foreclosure.
See full story.