No hope for help… | Oddly Enough | Reuters
“I have a message for every homeowner worried about rising mortgage payments: The best you can do for your family is to call 1-800-995-HOPE,”
… Bush said after a White House meeting with administration officials and lenders on a new plan to help.
Unfortunately he was a couple digits off, it is actually 1-888-995-HOPE(4673) . That gets you through to the Homeownership Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit group which offers free housing counseling for homeowners.
The article above gave me a giggle.
The “subprime mortgage” problem is being beaten to death on the news, and I have no intention of beating it to death here. If you can’t afford a house, look for a cheaper one. When determining whether you can afford a house, you don’t count future increases in income or expected appreciation of the property into the equation. And if you’re a bank buying mortgage notes from mortgage brokers, please check the financials of every single mortgagee before you use my savings to buy it.
Simple.
It’s the American dream, again. Anyone can be a homeowner.
Never mind the incalculably bad political decisions that have led to this situation. Let’s see: unemployment is up, salaries aren’t increasing, making it difficult to adjust to balloon payments. The value of houses is dropping, evaporating home equity.
And now, foreign investors are pulling their money out of the whole industry. The public debt? That’s owned by foreign investors. It increases every time a bank forecloses on a mortgage – the bank can only get pennies on the dollar in a sheriff’s sale. The investors are pulling their money out, destabilizing the stock market. Our money is worth much less in the world market, giving many Americans the mistaken impression that everyone in the world is greedily charging us more for things like oil and clothes. It’s not greed, folks. It’s called the “Exchange Rate.”
We are so screwed, even those of us who aren’t on the verge of losing a house we shouldn’t have been allowed to buy in the first place.
Bad Behavior
Member of American Mensa, Ltd.
Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
Potential Threat To The Nation
Amazon.com Daily Deals