plus/minus epsilon

I’ve been curious for a long time about how nonprofit organizations play a role in the housing market so today I decided to read the published financials of Mercy Housing, one of the largest nonprofit developers in the US.

When I was doing the research for my last blog post, I was reading the website for Pacific Coast Banker's Bank and saw that one of the products they offered under "Loan Hedging" was called a back-to-back swap for converting fixed-rate loans to floating-rate. I had no idea what that was and I couldn't see what problem it solved, but I thought it sounded cool at least.

Today I decided to read Sterling Bank's most recent 10-Q, to get a better understanding of how a savings and loan bank works. This blog goes through it at a high-level with commentary and graphs.

In my last post, I discussed Income Share Agreements (ISAs), including their many downsides and how they’re prone to being more expensive than traditional loans. In this post, I wanted to discuss something that I think is a much safer solution to the same problem: Income-Based Repayments (IBR) for a loan.

Income Share Agreements, or ISAs, are contracts where a borrower receives something of value, and in exchange they give the lender a percentage of their income every year for a fixed number of years. A lot of people have been proposing them as an alternative to traditional student loans.