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To the single Mom, I will remember you in my prayers and you do have my sympathy, the banks are really stupid in some instances. When my cousin was having a hard time she tried to get the bank to write another loan for 10,000 or so to cover the commision, they laughed at her. She could of at that time sold and she was willing to pay the commision back in a personal loan they told her no. So she walked awy but at the last minute the bank agreed to a short sale and instead lost more than the money she wanted in a personal loan, and she was now not obligated to pay the deficiencey. It sounds to crazy to be true!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thank You, Wendy. I just get tired of people soapboxing when they really don't know what's like. I admit I could have been better informed, but I am not a financial expert and I trusted some one who represented themselves as such.
Just because it sucks it doesn't mean it wasn't your responsibility. I hope you can learn from this experience that it is YOUR responsibility to understand all the terms of the documents. If you don't understand the terms of the mortgage you need to hire an attorney to explain them to you. Hopefully you will be able to regroup and recover from this experience.
I do think it's your responsibility, but I still feel bad for you. It sucks to lose your home.
to be fair some people were out and out lied to and in some cases terms were charged at the last minute. I think they said country wide is under investigation right now.
wanted big fancy truck, took home equity loan to buy truck, couldn't make payments, took second mortgage, couldn't make payments........lost house, empty since last Aug.
Just another example of that "came of age during Reagan material kid" mentality, where "I WANT!!!" takes a precedence over "I can". They started off by playing with credit cards, advanced to mortgages, and now they're steadily marching towards the abyss dragging not just their country but possibly the whole world with them
Anyone else thinking The Grapes of Wrath? With the American dollar as weak as it is, shrinking job market and the real estate debacle just starting to come to light, no wonder so many people are considering bailing on a house which has become a noose that is getting tighter and tighter every month.
We bought our current house during the salad days in 2005, and we are now, of course, kicking ourselves for doing so. We got a conventional loan and we can afford our bills. We are fortunate. But our house depreciated at least $80,000 in the last year and 1/2. As mentioned, everyone will be affected by this debacle.
How much further will this downward spiral go? When does a person get to a point of saying "this is a sinking ship and it's time to jump." My circumstances are nowhere near desperation, but I think we all need to keep our eyes open to protect ourselves from whatever calamity might be coming. Can you beleive our current administration will not even mention the word recession?
To the people in more dire circumstances right now, only you can determine when it's time to "jump". Personal ethics aren't going to pay the bills. And how ethical were the morgage companies in the first place? They bear a large portion of the blame.
I don't think anyone should feel smug in their position because they are not floundering yet. If you lose your job, or someone gets sick, or you just need to transfer with your current job, this mess will affect you too. I for one am keeping my ear to the wall. Good luck to all of you in hard circumstances right now!
And to the OP, I would be willing to give up dinners out, HBO and I'd have no problem driving an economical car. If I still couldn't make ends meet, would I consider walking away? Yes I would. With property values falling at the current rate and who knows if they will ever recover, it seems like an impossible battle to win for some. I wouldn't let a house ruin my life. If I had to rent for the next 10 years, so be it.
We bought our current house during the salad days in 2005, and we are now, of course, kicking ourselves for doing so. We got a conventional loan and we can afford our bills. We are fortunate. But our house depreciated at least $80,000 in the last year and 1/2. As mentioned, everyone will be affected by this debacle.
What did you pay? What is it worth?
Quote:
How much further will this downward spiral go? When does a person get to a point of saying "this is a sinking ship and it's time to jump."
It's your home.
Quote:
And how ethical were the morgage companies in the first place? They bear a large portion of the blame.
I don't think that at all. People were falling all over themselves, thinking they would get rich quick. Now they aren't and they are blaming someone else. It's greed, run amok. It seems like the first thing Americans do these days is find someone else to blame for their own problems.
Lilybeans, We paid $412,000. It's worth about $325,000 to $335,00 now. and yes, it is my home in that it is the house where I currently live, but for a lot of people, their house has become their prison.
I do think that much of the root cause of this whole fiasco is greed. We agree there, but the onus of blame goes to the morgage companies, IMO.
We are just your average family who bought a house when we moved because of a job transfer. I wish we had decided to rent instead, but we are not greedy investors by any means.
My point is, all of us are in an exceedingly vulnerable situation right now. Even people who have everything in order right now are being severly impacted. I'm staying right where I am for now, but I'm not going to let sentimentality get in the way of what's the best for my family. Like I said, I'm not going to fight a battle I can't win.
"People were falling all over themselves, thinking they would get rich quick. Now they aren't and they are blaming someone else. It's greed, run amok. It seems like the first thing Americans do these days is find someone else to blame for their own problems."
The loosening of the credit market was the enabler for a lot of these folks. When I bought my first house, the bank wanted 20% down. I fully understood the reasoning behind their demand, and I managed to pony up the money. When the bubble was peaking, if a person was breathing and had a pulse they could "qualify" for a no money down deal, even though the bankers were concerned there was a bubble and values could drop. Just who wasn't being responsible???
This mess occurred, in large part, because credit was loosened after 911. Why? To keep the economy from tanking out of fear over a two-bit extremist nut-case hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan. - a nut-case, BTW, that we have never found in seven years, which in itself speaks volumes to the incompetence and lack of focus of our leadership. The people looking must have been selected from the losers of the Easter Egg hunt on the White House lawn.
That "stimulus" to the economy didn't get cranked down to more normal levels for way too long, and because of that, there was money out there in the marketplace seeking good investments that weren't available.
Rather than properly shepherd the country by tightening the purse-strings after a reasonable recovery period from the attack, our leadership kept succumbing to pressure - to keep the good times going, and to fund a war in the wrong country by use of funny money. For some strange reason, that only made the problem worse.
Let's get back to the "smaller" problem of those loans to unqualified people. There are some parallels in those unethical home sales to the sale of illegal drugs. The pusher makes the initial entry easy, in hopes of wild profits later, and doesn't give a rats a-- what happens to the buyer in the long run. The buyer doesn't think anything bad will happen, and the pusher and friends assure them that they are getting a good deal.
In the case of a pusher, he at least expects to maintain a relationship with his clients and continue to deal with them until they die, go to jail, or go broke. In the case of those providing loans, they did so knowing full well that they would be selling those loans to other companies and not have to live with the fallout of their actions.
When you have government sponsored programs saying that drugs are bad for people, the drug problem is bad enough, but when the government keeps repeating the mantra that "home ownership is good" during a time of unethical lending, then even some people smart enough to not get caught in drugs can be enticed into a no-win "ownership."
Where were the warnings not to get in over your head? Where were the "This is your finances, this is your finances on ARMS" public service ads? Instead of those warnings, there were tv programs like "Flip This House" and "How to make millions in real-estate" feeding off the frenzy and chumming the waters.
Sure, you can blame the buyers for being weak or not having common sense, some of them undoubtedly were both, and some were just out to try to scam the system. You can even get your jollies from doing that publicly in rants, if you are mean-spirited and love to kick people who are down along with those few abusers of the system. So many gullible fools in this country have learned their ethics from shock jocks and fake radio therapists that I'm no longer surprised by the acid-tongued vapid comments from the peanut gallery.
The simple fact is that we only had this problem of people walking away from mortgaged homes once before outside of major depressions, and it happened in Texas in the S&L scandal, and someone from Texas who happens to now be in charge apparently learned even less from that scandal than he did from hearing about Vietnam.
Had our leadership, from the top down, been real leaders and reigned in even the worst of the companies and executives approving loans that were insane, then that insanity wouldn't have pervaded the entire market. Instead, they rolled in the money, sat back, and claimed that the economy and housing market was doing great -until it started to fall apart.
In that context, the phrase I quoted at the beginning of the post makes perfect sense.
"People were falling all over themselves, thinking they would get rich quick. Now they aren't and they are blaming someone else. It's greed, run amok. It seems like the first thing Americans do these days is find someone else to blame for their own problems."
If you are the little guy, and you got suckered in, prepare to be blamed. After all, when the fool stubs his toe, he curses the pebble.
"People were falling all over themselves, thinking they would get rich quick. Now they aren't and they are blaming someone else. It's greed, run amok. It seems like the first thing Americans do these days is find someone else to blame for their own problems."
The loosening of the credit market was the enabler for a lot of these folks. When I bought my first house, the bank wanted 20% down. I fully understood the reasoning behind their demand, and I managed to pony up the money. When the bubble was peaking, if a person was breathing and had a pulse they could "qualify" for a no money down deal, even though the bankers were concerned there was a bubble and values could drop. Just who wasn't being responsible???
This mess occurred, in large part, because credit was loosened after 911. Why? To keep the economy from tanking out of fear over a two-bit extremist nut-case hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan. - a nut-case, BTW, that we have never found in seven years, which in itself speaks volumes to the incompetence and lack of focus of our leadership. The people looking must have been selected from the losers of the Easter Egg hunt on the White House lawn.
That "stimulus" to the economy didn't get cranked down to more normal levels for way too long, and because of that, there was money out there in the marketplace seeking good investments that weren't available.
Rather than properly shepherd the country by tightening the purse-strings after a reasonable recovery period from the attack, our leadership kept succumbing to pressure - to keep the good times going, and to fund a war in the wrong country by use of funny money. For some strange reason, that only made the problem worse.
Let's get back to the "smaller" problem of those loans to unqualified people. There are some parallels in those unethical home sales to the sale of illegal drugs. The pusher makes the initial entry easy, in hopes of wild profits later, and doesn't give a rats a-- what happens to the buyer in the long run. The buyer doesn't think anything bad will happen, and the pusher and friends assure them that they are getting a good deal.
In the case of a pusher, he at least expects to maintain a relationship with his clients and continue to deal with them until they die, go to jail, or go broke. In the case of those providing loans, they did so knowing full well that they would be selling those loans to other companies and not have to live with the fallout of their actions.
When you have government sponsored programs saying that drugs are bad for people, the drug problem is bad enough, but when the government keeps repeating the mantra that "home ownership is good" during a time of unethical lending, then even some people smart enough to not get caught in drugs can be enticed into a no-win "ownership."
Where were the warnings not to get in over your head? Where were the "This is your finances, this is your finances on ARMS" public service ads? Instead of those warnings, there were tv programs like "Flip This House" and "How to make millions in real-estate" feeding off the frenzy and chumming the waters.
Sure, you can blame the buyers for being weak or not having common sense, some of them undoubtedly were both, and some were just out to try to scam the system. You can even get your jollies from doing that publicly in rants, if you are mean-spirited and love to kick people who are down along with those few abusers of the system. So many gullible fools in this country have learned their ethics from shock jocks and fake radio therapists that I'm no longer surprised by the acid-tongued vapid comments from the peanut gallery.
The simple fact is that we only had this problem of people walking away from mortgaged homes once before outside of major depressions, and it happened in Texas in the S&L scandal, and someone from Texas who happens to now be in charge apparently learned even less from that scandal than he did from hearing about Vietnam.
Had our leadership, from the top down, been real leaders and reigned in even the worst of the companies and executives approving loans that were insane, then that insanity wouldn't have pervaded the entire market. Instead, they rolled in the money, sat back, and claimed that the economy and housing market was doing great -until it started to fall apart.
In that context, the phrase I quoted at the beginning of the post makes perfect sense.
"People were falling all over themselves, thinking they would get rich quick. Now they aren't and they are blaming someone else. It's greed, run amok. It seems like the first thing Americans do these days is find someone else to blame for their own problems."
If you are the little guy, and you got suckered in, prepare to be blamed. After all, when the fool stubs his toe, he curses the pebble.
Excellent thoughts, scored a point from me!
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. They started off by playing with credit cards, advanced to mortgages, and now they're steadily marching towards the abyss dragging not just their country but possibly the whole world with them
