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there's always money.

Based on the the information you provided, people told you straight up what they thought of your decision. You didn't like the answers you got, and now everyone is "losers" because they don't think you should go the immoral/unethical/illegal route and foreclose on a house you *can afford to pay for*.

This thread turned out 100% as you expected... people are discussing "WHEN it might be okay to allow foreclosure and for which reasons"; your reasons just doesn't happen to fall into that category.

By the way, the whole "my house is sitting on a swamp and no one told me" thing doesn't really jive... when you build a house there are soil samples taken and tests made to ensure that your home will be okay there. These are required for every home that is built.

I wish I had a list of all the types of people cody has called losers. We're on hallowed ground here.

What in the world happened here?

The usual.

After reading this thread, that whole US "credit crunch" makes more sense. When you borrow money in Iceland, paying it back isn't really something you "think about".

You shouldn't have to here in the States, either. But between banks accepting "mortgage brokers'" assurances that their clients were credit worthy, and many of those same brokers actively being corrupt, we wound up with people who could barely afford the first payment getting loans for $500,000 homes. The whole "subprime" lending thing is about middlemen cashing in and leaving the banks and the borrowers out in the cold. I'd LOVE to see a bailout for banks that were hoodwinked by brokers, and for borrowers who were likewise swindled, and prison for people who actively sought to fool and defraud people and lenders.

And real estate speculators should bite the bullet, while people trying to find a place to actually live should get some help getting out from under their current mess. In the late 1980s there was a real estate bust that was caused by builders overbuilding certain markets-I lost a lot of money because of that, and would have lost more if I hadn't had an assignment to go overseas and thus an incentive to sell at a loss when I did. This is just far more widespread, hurting far more people. The cause is still greed on someone's part...and not the borrowers/homeowners.

?

A bank that doesn't check up on its borrowers is just as at fault as everyone else in that subprime debacle.

In contrast, with my lender and broker, I had to jump through some very serious hoops for my mortgage. The whole process from start to completion was ong and arduous, and I have good credit. The thought that it would be much easier for someone with much worse credit to get such a loan in the US makes we wonder just what the hell was wrong with those lenders.

Banks get overwhelmed by business, just like any other business. Not that I'm thinking there are very many banks that were actually completely innocent in this. But the overwhelming blame for this goes to those corrupt middlemen, and I hope they get hammered badly.

For what it's worth, my current mortgage is a refinance. The original was worked out by our builder, who required lots of documentation that we were indeed credit worthy. When we refinanced, we had to supply the same stuff (which was fortunately still filed together). We wound up lowering our interest rate through this process, and thus our payments. And in the process, we found out that there were lenders out there who were willing to lend us a HUGE amount of money just because our credit had been checked by a mortgage lender. More credit is not something I need!

Then there is something seriously wrong with that process (as is evidenced by the resulting mess). The lenders don't want to be more heavily regulated and said they're more than able to police themselves. Although I'm not always a fan of governmental intervention, they rightly said that it's hard to trust the lenders to police themselves since they failed so bloody miserably to do so the last time around.

Really, how hard is it to do a credit check and salary and net worth confirmation? Also, is it really that complicated to do a proper home value assessment?

In any case, I have great respect for my mortgage broker. They facilitated the application process for me by getting me to submit all my documentation all in advance and helped me expedite the completion of the application documentation for the various companies I was potentially going to go with. In the end I got a very good rate, and a better one that I would have likely gotten had I looked for my mortgage without a broker. My lender did the house appraisal in a timely manner too BTW.

So, while it was a tough process, it was a good one. Safe for the lender, while the mortgage broker gets his commission, and I get my low rate.

can we just close this thread already? cody lost her stars, got whatever she had on her chest off it, and got owned. either close the thread or make it about llamas

That is so weird. I honest to God just saw llamas on my way to pick up my kids. Truth. Never seen them in that field before.

This is exactly what will cause more regulation of the lending industry here. They were given a chance to police themselves, and the promise of "increased stockholder value" trumped "common sense and good business." They tried, they lost. Badly. When you subcontract everything, you need to pay close attention to your subcontractors' credentials. Again, stockholder return seems to have driven the lending industry from a small bunch of hard-boiled, reliable lenders into a large bunch of idiots. The suits need to go back to school. Some of them should have to put that off until after they get out of jail, in my opinion. Yours were truly professional, and I have no quarrel with them, nor with most of them here in the States. But there's no licensing, no oversight, and no control of the "mortgage broker" title, so a number of very shady operators have sullied the name of that profession.

I see llamas around here now and then. And there are emu ranches in the area too-pretty weird to see. Weirder still: a bison ranch about an hour east of here.

But llamas are more fun.

Yep.

My mother lives on a fixed income, with a substantial portion provided by one bank's dividend. The dividend is being cut 41% today to generate cash to shore up bad loans from said bank's acquisition of a California interest-only mortgage company. This part of the new story caught my eye emphasis added

Cutting the dividend is better than insolvency, I suppose. Really, in addition to ghporter's proper castigation of shady mortgage brokers, I blame the bank brass for being chumps about their investments. Too bad others have to pay for those ill-time acquisitions, just as others have to pay for the freeloaders who abandon their mortgage commitments.

It's also partly to do with lunatic focus on quarterly results rather than long term health of stocks.

Florida still a leader in foreclosures for March - Tampa Bay Business Journal:
is this post on topic enough for you?

Coincidence? I think not.

I've known since I was a child that the building codes and overall quality of houses in FLA suck ass.

No wonder there are so many foreclosures, crappy houses valued 300K+ over what they are actually worth make for a bad situation.