In just one month, more than 1,000 motorists have been charged under a tough new crackdown on speeding in Ontario - a figure that has “floored” insurance officials and left the Police Commissioner who recommended the idea wishing it were even tougher.

Effective from the start of October, anyone charged in Ontario with exceeding the speed limit by 50 kilometres an hour or more faces a barrage of harsh penalties, including a fine of between $2,000 and $10,000 and having their licence suspended and vehicle impounded for one week.

Even Police Commissioner Julian Fantino acknowledged he was shocked when he learned that 1,057 drivers had been charged as of Sunday, with an average rate of about 38 a day.

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The region’s top real estate pros warned us a couple of years ago that home values in the Northern San Joaquin Valley were overinflated.

Then gasoline, food and other expenses started climbing. Adjustable-rate loans began to reset to higher payments, and defaults took off. Credit got harder to come by. New homes flooded the market. Sales stagnated and prices sank. Consumers hit the wall.

One of those who identified in early 2005 that the market was headed for a fall, Mike Zagaris, president of PMZ Real Estate in Modesto, said the current slide shouldn’t be a shock, given the market’s previous peak.

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Millions of uninsured drivers in California could have their license plates yanked or their cars immobilized as part of a crackdown being considered by Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner.

Poizner is huddling with his political advisors and consulting potential allies about putting an initiative on the November 2008 ballot. The measure would give law enforcement broad new powers to go after those who flout the law by driving without insurance.

The Department of Insurance is unsure exactly how many of California’s 23.2 million licensed drivers don’t buy insurance. Estimates range from a low of 3.2 million to a high of 5.7 million. At least 1.4 million of the uninsured drivers are in Los Angeles County, according to the department.

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Financial planners should know before the end of this year how the long-awaited Uniform Finance Broking legislation will impact on their ability to sell reverse mortgages in Australia.

A first draft of the legislation, which governs the sale of all credit products, including reverse mortgages, will be released for public consultation by the end of the year, according to the NSW Commissioner of Fair Trading, Lyn Baker.

The legislation is being drafted by the NSW Office of Fair Trading as a national project of the Ministerial Council on Consumer Affairs, which will eventually give it currency throughout Australia.

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The so-called “short sale” of a home can be a viable alternative to foreclosure and will become more prevalent as millions of adjustable-rate mortgages reset over the next 18 months, real estate industry observers say.

Short sales, an agreement that allows a home to be sold for less than the amount owed, have been around for a long time, but have come to prominence lately because of the unprecedented increase in foreclosures, said Arthur Marvin, broker for Wingate Mortgage Group in Las Vegas and class instructor on foreclosures and short sales.

He said there are 3,350 homes listed as short sales in Las Vegas, more than double the number from four months ago, and 1,450 of them are vacant. That’s a good indicator that many of the short sales are investor-owned, Marvin said.

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In the UK, it is a legal requirement that any active motorist with a car on the road has to have motor car insurance. There is no alternative purely and simply because it is a criminal offence to drive on a public road without basic rudimentary motor car insurance, and it is actually your car that is insured and not you. Even if your car were insured, you would still be prosecuted if you happened to be driving a friend’s car that was not. The law is very specific on this matter and so it is extremely important to make sure that you know your motor car insurance stuff!

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REVERSE mortages are one of Australia’s fastest-growing financial products but continue to attract more than their share of conroversy.

The idea of dipping into your home for cash sits uncomfortably with some retirees, and many financial planners are concerned about potential problems.

But criticism has not slowed the growth of the sector, which started in Australia more than 20 years ago and is now booming.

A report released last month by Trowbridge Deloitte and the Senior Australian Equity Release Association of Lenders (SEQUAL) found the reverse mortgage market had more than doubled in size in the past two years to $1.81 billion, growing 67 per cent in the past 12 months.

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Elizabeth and Jose Torres were happy with their small Phoenix home.

Even when a loan officer approached the couple in 2005 about buying a bigger home for a good price, they weren’t interested, Elizabeth said.

Eventually, though, the “persuasive” loan officer sold them on the four-bedroom Queen Creek home, she said.

The house had a motivated seller. The couple would get $20,000 back on the sale. And they could quickly refinance at a lower interest rate to bring down the $2,000-plus monthly mortgage payments - all things the Torreses said their loan officer promised.

But after signing the loan documents, the couple quickly wanted out of the deal. They couldn’t get copies of the papers or answers about why the figures didn’t match what had been promised and why some lines on the document were blank, Elizabeth said. But it was too late.

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Reverse mortgages have been a popular tool for cash-strapped retirees, but wealthier folks are finding ways to use them, too. With a mansion worth $21 million, a wealthy retiree near Philadelphia decided the most logical way to access that cash and improve his standard of living was to take out a reverse mortgage on the house and invest the money for more income.

“That’s obviously an exception,” said Douglas Ziegler, a reverse mortgage officer with Gateway Funding in Horsham, Pa., who handled the transaction for a 64-year-old man. “It’s not your typical loan.”

Yet deals like that are becoming more common.

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A U.S. Senate committee voted to extend the federal terrorism insurance program for seven years, less than half the period approved by the House, while excluding coverage of nuclear, biological and chemical attacks.

The same committee approved a bill to reform the federal flood insurance program without considering a House plan to extend coverage to protect against wind damage.

The Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, first passed after the Sept. 11 attacks made private policies scarce, promises to reimburse insurers if another major attack occurs. The Senate bill, approved Wednesday by the Banking Committee, 20-1, would extend the law until 2014 and include acts of domestic terrorism. The Bush administration said it would back the Senate bill after threatening to veto the House version.

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