Finances at MGIC improved that much more in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Milwaukee-based home loan insurer Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corp. (MGIC) may have posted a loss of $135.3 million for the fourth quarter in 2011, but that’s down from $186.7 million in 2010, a decline of nearly 30 cents a share that signifies improvements for the embattled insurance company.

For January, MGIC wrote $1.3 billion in new insurance contracts, down slightly from $1.4 billion in November. For the entire fourth quarter, the company wrote $4.2 billion in new insurance, and for 2011, its $14.2 billion was a nearly $2 billion increase from the $12.3 billion of 2010. Altogether, at the end of 2011, MGIC had $172.9 billion in mortgage insurance on its books on 1.1 million mortgages.

According to a HousingWire piece on MGIC’s finances, January was also a good month for the quality of the company’s insured mortgages.

“For the 31-day period, the insurer saw its delinquent loan inventory fall from 175,839 at the beginning of the month to 174,418 loans by month’s end,” the report stated. “New notices on delinquent loans hit 13,700, but were offset by 10,662 loan cures, 3,967 paid loans and 292 rescissions and denials.”

MGIC also noted that delinquencies trended downwards in the fourth quarter, though lingering defaults from earlier quarters continue to influence its bottom line.