Comments on: Howard Kurtz on mortgage loans

By: Baklava

Baklava — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 20:11:17 +0000

Tony, that is in the paperwork.

By: Tony

Tony — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 19:10:10 +0000

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure up your bills and add to them what your mortgage payment would be, in order to see what you can afford.

But that can also be a problem. You can afford the payment, but because of the loan you signed, you may be paying 10 years interest only, and maybe have a rate balloon after that time. There’s a lot of shenanigans that are played to get the payment number down.

They ought to have stickers on loans telling you exactly what percentage of the original cost you’ll be paying when you make that last payment (like on milk).

For a $100,000 house, one loan may cost you $250,000, and another one might cost you $400,000. Your payments would be lesser on the second one.

By: Sensible Mom

Sensible Mom — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 16:48:32 +0000

Howard Kurtz Get It Right

It reminds me of Business Week’s portrayal of these “victims” I wrote about way back in December… Don’t use your home as a means to finance goodies and activities you can’t otherwise afford if you don’t want to be out on the street.”

By: PCD

PCD — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 15:44:08 +0000

Remember, Hillary used to sell homes on Land Contracts. When the buyer was late with just one payment, Hillary would evict them and sell the house on land contract to the next sucker.

By: david foster

david foster — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 13:19:25 +0000

There have certainly been a lot of people “rolling the dice,” as ST points out, and there have also been plenty of mortgage brokers, etc who have been pretty deceptive in their practices. But one of the main problems has been the inability of people to protect themselves by understanding what deal they were really signing up for.

How many people are graduating from high school–and even college–without the ability to read and understand complex documents and to do simple math? I suspect it’s a pretty alarming percentage.

As public schools turn everything into squishy-soft “social studies,” people lose the ability to manage their own financial affairs prudently.

By: Drewsmom

Drewsmom — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 10:45:17 +0000

So this means when hill or breck girl gets in I can go buy a home with no $ down and they will bail my ass out on the the tax payers backs, man, what an incentive for anybody now to go out and get the home they can’t afford and I gotta pay for it. This is hopeless. !!!!

By: camojack

camojack — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 05:40:05 +0000

Fortunately, as an aircraft mechanic, I’ve got mad skills that also translate into being able to work on my own home…which I do. I bought a “fixer-upper” for $100K, and due to my fixing up, “La Casa de Camo” (my rambling estate) is now worth over twice that. Oh, and one of my (many) sidelines is RealtorÂ®, so I got a “rebate” in the form of a commission. A big problem with some of these defaulting mortgages is the adjustable rate; they were cheap when they started, but then they went up…

By: Terrye

Terrye — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 03:21:32 +0000

ST:

I had a real estate license until I just could not stand it anymore and left the business…but I could see this coming some time ago.

A young couple would come to me and want to buy a home, I would take them to see something that they could actually afford and often as not they were insulted. They would find these mortgage company ads in the papers and get these 100% loans and I would tell them, The mortgage broker will have a lot more equity in this home than you do, they are going to want something in return. This could come back on you. More often than not I might as well have been talking to a wall. All they wanted to know was how much will the payment be?

So when this came crashing down the only thing I was surprised about was how long it took.