Wedding Gifts May Be Considered Acceptable Mortgage Funds
Many borrowers receive substantial monetary gifts from family and friends during wedding celebrations. One common concern borrowers have is whether those large deposits can be used toward a mortgage transaction. The good news is that in many cases, funds received as wedding gifts may be considered acceptable. A recent marriage does not automatically create a problem when documenting large deposits.
Wedding Gift Funds May Be Allowed Within 90 Days Of Marriage
Mortgage guidelines may allow large deposits from unrelated persons when the funds are tied to a wedding. If the deposits stem from wedding gifts and are received within 90 days of the date listed on the marriage certificate or marriage license, those funds may be considered acceptable for qualifying purposes.
This can be extremely helpful for newly married borrowers who arepurchasingtheir first home, combining finances, strengthening reserves, increasing available assets for closing, and preparing for a larger down payment. Proper documentation is critical when large deposits appear on bank statements.
Many borrowers become concerned when underwriters question recent deposits appearing in their bank accounts. However, not every large deposit creates a financing issue. When the funds are clearly tied to a wedding and supported by the marriage license or certificate, lenders may allow those assets to remain eligible. This is especially important for borrowers who have recently had these instances.
Opened joint accounts
Combined savings
Deposited wedding checks
Received cash gifts from guests
Received contributions from family and friends
Sometimes, the right guidance is simply knowing how to document the story behind the deposits properly.Contactus so we can help you qualify for a mortgage loan.
For the last several years, people have been waiting for a housing crash that never came. Home prices kept climbing. Buyers kept competing over asking price. Every prediction of a collapse quietly expired.
Here’s what most of those predictions missed. A real estate crash did happen. It just happened in commercial real estate, apartment buildings, retail, and office, not in the housing market most people are watching.
Same interest rate environment. Two completely different outcomes. Understanding why explains both what’s happening in your neighborhood and what’s happening to a lot of real estate investors right now.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or investment advice. Any investment involves risk, and you should consult your financial advisor, attorney, or CPA before making any investment decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The author and associated entities disclaim any liability for loss incurred as a result of the use of this material or its content.
Most doctors don’t lose money in real estate because they lack motivation.
They lose it by trusting the wrong sponsor or skipping the details that matter.
Passive Real Estate Academy shows you how to vet deals like a pro, so you don’t have to learn the hard way.
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Why Residential Prices Haven’t Fallen
The numbers don’t support a residential crash narrative. As of June data, home prices rose 0.3% month over month and are up 3% year over year for single-family homes, according to Redfin. The median existing home price nationally sits at $440,600, up 1.8% from a year earlier.
A crash requires a flood of supply overwhelming demand. That’s not the current picture. There are 1.56 million homes for sale, only up 1.3% from a year ago, representing 4.6 months of supply, essentially flat compared to last year.
Foreclosure headlines can be misleading here. A widely cited 21% jump in foreclosure filings sounds alarming until you see the base number. The first half of this year saw roughly 227,000 foreclosures nationally. In the same period in 2010, it was 1.65 million. A 21% increase off a small number is still a small number.
New construction has stayed flat for four years and remains below pandemic-era levels. Meanwhile, an estimated 350,000 homes are lost to fires annually in the US, quietly offsetting new inventory that never gets discussed in supply conversations.
Then there’s the rate mechanism itself. The 30-year fixed mortgage rate sits around 6.6%, tracking closely with the 10-year Treasury yield. Because lending to the federal government carries essentially no default risk, investors demand a premium to lend to individual homebuyers instead. When the 10-year yield was under 2% in early 2022, mortgage rates hovered near 3%. As inflation accelerated and the Federal Reserve raised rates, the 10-year climbed to 4.63%, pulling mortgage rates up with it.
Geopolitical events add another layer. Rate movements have tracked with developments in the Iran conflict. Energy price spikes raise inflation expectations, which pushes investors to demand higher yields as compensation. For the past four years, mortgage rates have stayed rangebound between roughly 6% and 8%, a pattern likely to continue absent a major shift in either monetary policy or geopolitical conditions.
The result is a residential market that’s expensive and slow-moving, not collapsing.
Why Commercial Real Estate Is a Different Story
Residential buyers overwhelmingly use 30-year fixed-rate mortgages. Commercial real estate, particularly value-add multifamily properties, is often financed very differently.
Many of these deals were financed with floating-rate loans on short terms, frequently three to five years, based on an assumption that rates would stay low or that a refinance would be straightforward when the loan matured.
That assumption is where the trouble starts. When a commercial loan reaches maturity, the entire remaining balance comes due at once. This is called a balloon payment, and it stands in sharp contrast to a residential mortgage, where each monthly payment simply chips away at a fixed 30-year schedule. Many of these loans also carry prepayment penalties, making even an early, strategic exit costly.
At maturity, an operator typically has three options: refinance, sell, or bring in additional capital.
Refinancing has become harder because higher rates mean lenders will only extend a smaller percentage of a property’s current value than they would have in 2021. If the property’s value has also declined, which is common in this environment, the gap between the old loan and what a new lender will offer widens further.
Selling isn’t necessarily easier. Commercial property values are closely tied to prevailing interest rates, so a sale executed today often means realizing a loss compared to the original purchase price.
That frequently leaves one remaining path: bringing in new capital. Sponsors or investors contribute additional funds to shrink the loan balance enough for a lender to approve refinancing. It’s money nobody budgeted for at the outset.
A Perfect Storm, Not a Single Cause
What’s made this stretch particularly difficult is that several pressures hit simultaneously rather than one at a time.
Interest rates rose sharply, increasing debt costs directly. Inflation pushed up operating expenses, insurance premiums in particular have climbed significantly in many markets. Rent growth slowed as tenants reached an affordability ceiling, limiting how much of those rising costs could be passed through. And in multifamily specifically, a wave of new supply built during the low-rate years is now delivering into a market where rent growth has already cooled, adding competitive pressure at exactly the wrong moment.
Rate resets, rising costs, an affordability ceiling, and new supply arriving together. That combination, more than any single factor, is what’s produced real distress in parts of the commercial market.
It’s also worth being direct about something. A lot of experienced operators, including large institutional players with far more resources than any individual sponsor, did not see this combination coming. Nobody underwrote deals in 2021 assuming rates would rise this quickly and then stay elevated this long, let alone account for something like a geopolitical shock affecting energy prices and inflation expectations.
That’s not a due diligence failure. It’s a set of conditions that hadn’t shown up together before.
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What This Means Going Forward
Real estate moves in cycles, and every cycle eventually produces both pain and opportunity, often at the same time.
The conditions currently causing distress in parts of the commercial market, loans coming due, forced sales, capital calls, are the same conditions that tend to create the next window of opportunity. Someone has to be on the other side of a forced sale. Distressed assets eventually get repriced to levels that make sense again for a new buyer.
If you’re currently invested in a commercial deal facing these pressures, that’s a real and uncomfortable situation. It doesn’t mean the opportunity in real estate has disappeared. It means that opportunity is currently showing up in a different form than it did during the low-rate years, one built around distressed pricing and disciplined underwriting rather than momentum.
Understanding the difference between how residential and commercial real estate are actually financed is the starting point for making sense of where the market goes next.
If you want to dig deeper into where we’re seeing opportunity emerge in this part of the cycle, we’re covering it at PIMDCON this September in Dallas.
Were these helpful in any way? Make sure to sign up for the newsletter and join the Passive Income Docs Facebook Group for more physician-tailored content.
Peter Kim, MD is the founder of Passive Income MD, the creator of Passive Real Estate Academy, and offers weekly education through his Monday podcast, the Passive Income MD Podcast. Join our community at the Passive Income Doc Facebook Group.
Disclaimer: I am not a CPA, attorney, or financial advisor. The information in this post is for educational purposes only and should not be construed as tax, legal, or financial advice. Please consult a qualified professional about your specific situation before making any decisions.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways
The best marketing emails don’t try to close the sale in the inbox — they earn the click and let the landing page do the selling, which changes how you write every part of the email from the subject line to the CTA.
Curiosity is the highest-leverage tool in email marketing, but only if it’s a contract: open the loop in the subject line, hold it through the body and close it on the landing page — because a click that leads nowhere destroys the trust your next open depends on.
The effectiveness of every marketing email you send comes down to two things: the subject line and the body. Miss on the subject line and the reader never opens the email. Nail the subject line but miss on the body, and the reader never clicks the link.
But most email advice gets both wrong in the same way — it tells you to be clear, be direct and get to the point. That advice will get your email deleted.
The best-performing marketing emails I’ve written don’t try to close the sale in the inbox. They do one job: earn the click. The landing page does the selling. When you understand that separation of duties, everything about how you write the email changes — the subject line, the opening, the body, the call to action.
Here’s the framework I’ve used across health, SaaS and service-business email campaigns, and how you can apply it to yours.
Start with the subject line, because nothing else matters if that fails
If your subject line doesn’t earn the open, nothing else in the email exists. So the subject line is where I spend a disproportionate amount of time — usually more than the body itself.
The single most effective lever I’ve found is curiosity built on a specific, unexpected fact. Not vague intrigue like “You won’t believe this,” but a concrete hook the reader can’t guess the answer to.
A SaaS onboarding email might use “The one Slack setting that cut our team’s meetings in half.” An agency newsletter might go with “Why our best-performing client stopped running Google Ads.” An e-commerce launch might land on “The material we almost didn’t use in this jacket (and why we’re glad we did).” A coach or service provider might try “The question I ask every new client in the first 10 minutes.” Notice what they have in common: each one references something specific, promises a payoff and refuses to give it away. That’s the loop.
Write 10 subject line variants before you settle. Pick the two or three punchiest, and A/B test if your platform allows it.
Open the loop in the first line
The opening line has one job: confirm the promise of the subject line and pull the reader deeper.
Three openings consistently work for me. The first is a direct question, such as “Did you know most of your churn happens in the first seven days?” It’s low-friction and positions the reader as someone who might not know the answer. The second is a credibility lead, such as “According to a Stanford study on decision fatigue,” which works when your claim needs to be believed before it can be acted on. The third is a short story, such as “Last week a customer told me something I’ve been thinking about ever since.” Slower, but powerful when you have a specific anecdote that illustrates the point.
Whichever opening you choose, keep it short. One or two sentences maximum before you get to the substance.
Keep the body punchy and stay in the loop
Once the reader is in, the job of the body is not to explain everything. It’s to build enough curiosity and credibility that clicking the link feels irresistible.
That means short sentences and short paragraphs. It means no jargon and no industry acronyms the reader has to decode. It means supporting any claim with a specific number, a named source or a concrete example — not vague authority. And it means addressing the obvious objection (“does this still work today?” or “does this apply to a business like mine?”) before the reader thinks it.
Critically, do not close the loop in the email. If the reader can get the full answer from the email alone, they have no reason to click.
The call to action is the payoff, not the pitch
Your CTA is where most emails fall apart. Writers either get too clever (“Discover the secret inside”) or too transactional (“Buy now”).
The best CTAs I’ve written point directly at the payoff the subject line promised — nothing more. “See the Slack setting.” “Read the case study.” “See the full framework.” Simple, specific and still inside the curiosity loop.
What this looks like in practice
Here’s a stripped-down example of the framework applied to a SaaS retention email. The subject line is “The one onboarding change that cut our churn by 40%.” The body reads:
When we started, most of our new customers churned in the first two weeks. We tried longer trials. We tried more emails. We tried a live onboarding call. Nothing moved the number. Then we changed one thing about how we asked customers to set up their account in the first five minutes. Churn dropped 40% the next quarter — and it’s held.
See what we changed: The five-minute setup change
Every line does specific work. The opening establishes the problem. The middle proves we tried the obvious fixes. The payoff hints at a specific change without revealing it. The click is the only way to close the loop.
The one rule that keeps this honest
Selling the click only works if the landing page keeps the promise. If your subject line hints at a 40% churn drop and the page delivers a vague product tour, the reader learns not to trust you — and your open rates on the next email will pay the price. The curiosity loop is a contract. Open it in the subject line, hold it through the body, close it on the page. Every time.
If you get that right, the click-through rate takes care of itself.
Key Takeaways
The best marketing emails don’t try to close the sale in the inbox — they earn the click and let the landing page do the selling, which changes how you write every part of the email from the subject line to the CTA.
Curiosity is the highest-leverage tool in email marketing, but only if it’s a contract: open the loop in the subject line, hold it through the body and close it on the landing page — because a click that leads nowhere destroys the trust your next open depends on.
The effectiveness of every marketing email you send comes down to two things: the subject line and the body. Miss on the subject line and the reader never opens the email. Nail the subject line but miss on the body, and the reader never clicks the link.
But most email advice gets both wrong in the same way — it tells you to be clear, be direct and get to the point. That advice will get your email deleted.
The best-performing marketing emails I’ve written don’t try to close the sale in the inbox. They do one job: earn the click. The landing page does the selling. When you understand that separation of duties, everything about how you write the email changes — the subject line, the opening, the body, the call to action.
Historically, demand for Treasury bills has come from governments, corporations, banks, money market funds, and institutional investors. Stablecoin issuers represent a new category of buyer.
As stablecoin supply expands, reserve portfolios must expand alongside it. Because those reserves are invested primarily in Treasury bills, repurchase agreements, and other cash-equivalent instruments, growth in blockchain-based payments and settlement activity increasingly translates into demand for traditional financial assets.
This creates a new connection between digital assets and conventional finance. Rather than remaining isolated within cryptocurrency markets, stablecoin adoption can influence Treasury demand, front-end yields, and short-term funding markets through the expansion of reserve portfolios.
Although stablecoins remain small relative to the overall Treasury market, they are becoming larger, more regulated, and more deeply integrated into the financial system. For fixed-income investors, this emerging source of demand may become an increasingly important consideration when assessing liquidity conditions and front-end yield dynamics.
Aave, one of the more active decentralized lending protocols, is preparing to phase out support for a range of underused asset reserves and fully wind down its presence on several smaller blockchain networks. The initiative, announced by founder Stani Kulechov, forms part of a broader push to shrink the protocol’s economic and technical risk footprint under newly formalized risk and asset-listing frameworks.
The plan calls for deprecating 50 low-adoption reserves spread across multiple Aave deployments.
In parallel, the DeFi protocol intends to orderly shut down entire markets on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos, which together account for another 25 reserves.
Twenty-one matured Pendle Principal Tokens will also be retired and replaced with newer-maturity versions.
Altogether, the changes affect approximately $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in outstanding debt—less than 1 percent of Aave’s overall deposits, which stand in the mid-teens of billions of dollars.
The six full market closures were selected after sharp declines in activity left revenue well below the cost of continued support.
Over the past six months, deposits on Sonic fell roughly 74 percent to about $7.6 million, Scroll dropped 86 percent to $2.2 million, zkSync declined 88 percent to roughly $844,000, Metis fell 79 percent to around $297,000, and Soneium plunged 95 percent to $173,000.
Aptos currently holds about $1.7 million in supply and $719,000 in debt, with available liquidity down approximately 94 percent.
Each of these deployments now generates under $5,000 in quarterly protocol revenue (some under $1,000), insufficient to cover oracle maintenance, risk monitoring, and operational overhead.
Individual reserve removals target assets that have stayed below usage thresholds, experienced steep deposit declines, or become redundant—such as bridged versions of tokens already available in native form, or instruments no longer producing yield.
Larger positions among those flagged include certain Bitcoin-wrapped assets and matured Pendle tokens.
Implementation is designed to be gradual so users can exit without forced liquidations.
Affected reserves will be frozen, blocking new deposits, borrows, or collateral additions, while supply and borrow caps are reduced to the minimum.
On the six retiring deployments, reserve factors are expected to rise to 99 percent (directing nearly all interest to the protocol treasury) and base borrowing rates set at 5 percent, creating incentives for suppliers to withdraw and borrowers to repay.
Once exposure declines sufficiently, live price feeds can be replaced with fixed oracles and the markets fully discontinued.
Kulechov emphasized that the moves should not be read as judgments on the underlying chains or layers themselves.
Instead, they aim to reduce Aave’s overall risk surface so the protocol can concentrate resources on higher-impact markets and future priorities, including potential expansion into areas such as securities finance.
Continuous risk assessment will remain in place across all remaining assets and deployments.
The recommendations were prepared by risk provider LlamaRisk in collaboration with other Aave service providers and are subject to DAO governance approval before taking full effect. If passed, the cleanup marks an early practical application of Aave’s updated Risk Framework and Technical Asset Listing Framework, signaling a more disciplined approach to portfolio management in an increasingly competitive DeFi landscape.
One in three Singaporean business owners still use their personal bank accounts for their company banking needs, trying to escape high transaction fees, according to a survey from MariBank, a digital bank owned by Southeast Asian tech firm Sea. That creates tax and legal headaches, as business owners find it difficult to deduce their legitimate profit and deductions come tax season.
“Our local banks are good, and international banks also have a strong presence here,” Natalia Goh, MariBank’s CEO, told Fortune. “But there are certain banking needs that are still underserved.”
MariBank’s answer is a business account with zero transaction fees and a single app that lets customers toggle between personal and business banking. “These needs are the white spaces that nobody’s really addressing,” Goh explains. “That’s what makes it exciting, and that’s where I think we have room to play.”
The origins of MariBank
MariBank launched in 2023 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sea, Southeast Asia’s largest tech firm and No. 12 on the Southeast Asia 500. Goh assumed her role as the bank’s CEO in 2024, taking over from its inaugural head Zheng Yudong.
Goh sees Maribank as a “natural extension” of Sea’s offerings on e-commerce site Shopee and financial payments platform Monee, which sit “at the heart” of its users’ digital lives. “Sea’s existing businesses give it insights and a good understanding of what consumers do online,” Goh said. “Banking was the obvious next piece of the puzzle.”
MariBank is one of five Singaporean digital banks set up after a 2019 ruling that empowered the monetary authority to issue standalone digital banking licenses. (A digital bank is a financial institution that operates entirely online through mobile apps and websites without any physical brick-and-mortar branches.) Other Singaporean digital banks include Trust Bank, which is a collaboration between Standard Chartered Bank and supermarket chain FairPrice Group, and GXS bank, a partnership between telco Singtel and superapp Grab.
Asia’s first digital banks emerged in Hong Kong, mainland China, and South Korea; Southeast Asia followed soon afterward. “In ASEAN, especially, digital banking licenses encourage greater participation and innovation in the banking sector, and make banking services more accessible to the masses,” Goh says.
Path to profitability
Still, the promise of digital banking has yet to be realized. Among Singapore’s digital banks which cater to retail consumers, only Trust Bank is profitable, posting its first profitable month in March.
In 2025, MariBank Singapore posted a loss of 55.6 million Singapore dollars ($43.4 million), larger than the 51.3 million loss reported the year before. Fellow digital bank GXS also posted a 208 million Singapore dollar loss last year, a slight narrowing of its 214 million Singapore dollar loss in 2024.
Each bank has a tight window to prove themselves. As part of the application process, each digital bank had to show a credible path to profitability within five years of launch. (MariBank, which launched in 2023, thus has a three-year runway; In January, parent group Sea injected $75 million Singapore dollars, or $58.6 million, into the bank, in a bid to help it scale.)
Both MariBank and GXS are now pushing into less-banked markets like Malaysia and the Philippines. GXS is a lead shareholder in GXBank, Malaysia’s first digital bank. MariBank debuted in the Philippines last year, following Sea’s acquisition of the rural bank Banco Laguna. Last month, the Philippines’ central bank upgraded MariBank’s license from that of a rural bank to a full-fledged digital bank.
The share of Filipinos with bank accounts jumped from 29% in 2019 to 56% in 2021 during the pandemic, according to the Philippine Information Agency.
“The idea is, with the product knowledge that we build up in Singapore, we can bring it across and deploy that in the Philippines,” Goh says. “We can localize it to the Filipino market, by lowering ticket sizes and changing the features a little.”
Unlike in Singapore, MariBank in the Philippines has had to adapt to a market that still relies on physical cash. According to Worldpay’s 2026 Global Payments Report, cash still holds 42% of point-of-sale payments in the Philippines, despite the rising popularity of e-wallets like GCash. As such, MariBank is piloting cash-in, cash-out partnerships with local retail outlets, something it doesn’t need to do in Singapore.
“Singapore is very much moving towards being cashless, and the Philippines is also heading in that direction, but there’s still quite a need for cash,” Goh explains.
Goh admits that MariBank is still in the “growth stage” in the Philippines; the company has yet to offer investment and overseas remittance products to its user-base. Still, she’s confident that MariBank Philippines can quickly scale, given Sea’s other offerings in the country.
“Shoppers are already acquainted with the Shopee name,” Goh explains. “That becomes a natural point for us to introduce MariBank, since it’s associated with a brand that they already know.” (Goh declined to share exact user numbers in the Philippines, but said the bank is on a “really good growth trajectory.”)
MariBank is also leveraging Sea’s own data to underwrite loans in a market with a thin formal credit history. “The Philippines’ credit bureau data is not as strong or robust, given that a lot of the population there may not have an existing credit product,” Goh says. “So we use quite a bit of data from Shopee to help us judge creditworthiness.”
Goh hopes that the Philippines will be the first step towards building a regional digital banking group, headquartered in Singapore. “Singapore is a sophisticated banking market, so it’ll be our hub for innovation, talent and strategy,” she says, adding that MariBank remains “open” to further expansion (though declined to name specific markets).
Ultimately, for Goh, the goal is straightforward: to make banking simple, reliable and rewarding. “No matter how much we expand, we will always stay true to these values,” she concluded. “They’ll continue being reflected in our product designs and the propositions that we roll out.”
The comedian’s Fathertime Bourbon won Best New Bourbon at the 2026 San Francisco World Spirits Competition with a 121-proof release named for his youngest child.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development will begin considering bids in September for the auction of 5,500 units in two separate reverse-mortgage pools where the borrowers are deceased.
Processing Content
A sale of 1,500 non-vacant properties, HNVLS 2026-1, which was originally scheduled to take place in February, will now open on Sept. 1. HUD resumed buyer qualification review in late July and opened access to the pool’s data room in early August, allowing eligible parties to perform due diligence.
Units, which remain occupied, are secured by first-lien Federal Housing Administration Home Equity Conversion Mortgages, where both the original borrower and spouse are deceased. Any heirs to the properties did not declare their intent to buy out the loans within the allowable time frame.
Total balance on the HECMs is approximately $454 million.
Participation in HUD loan sales is closed to individual buyers, with bid opportunities typically offered to nonprofits, government entities and institutional investors. Although HUD first announced the HNVLS in January, the agency delayed the auction in order to include mandatory qualification language, ensuring compliance with a Trump directive that sought to blunt the impact of large institutional investors.
Issued on January 20, President Trump’s Stopping Wall Street from Competing with Main Street Homebuyers executive order required the addition of bidder attestation requirements to be signed by participating entities. While sales to institutional buyers are still permitted, their attestations state they will neither use the sale to unfairly lock out local families nor engage in predatory practices detrimental to the community.
HUD’s new vacant-loan sale
Falcon Asset Sales will manage both the rescheduled offering and a newly announced HVLS 2027-1.
With a bid date tentatively planned for October, the pool consists of approximately 4,000 now unoccupied HECM-backed single-family properties. No loan balance was included in the latest notification.
As with the non-vacant sale, institutional buyers will be required to sign attestations to comply with the Trump order. HUD’s last HVLS featuring over 1,000 loans drew 22 buyers and closed in December 2025.
Terms of the two new sales are also written to maintain compliance with the requirements in Title X of the recently passed 21st Century Road to Housing Act. While the bill adds strict restrictions limiting the activity of institutional buyers with more than 350 properties, exceptions for the types of foreclosure and distressed sales, such as the latest offerings by HUD, make them eligible.
Excluded from the bidding process are organizations currently barred or suspended from participating in mortgage-related activity with the federal government, including companies that have had their Ginnie Mae issuance rights removed.
