Posted on 04/20/2012 8:12:02 AM PDT by C19fan
Johnny Whitmire shuts off his lawn mower and takes a long draw from a water bottle. He sloshes the liquid from cheek to cheek and squirts it between his work boots. He is sweating through his white T-shirt. His jeans are dirty. His middle-aged back hurts like hell. But the calf-high grass is cut, and the weeds are tamed at 1900 W. 10th St., a house that Whitmire and his family once called home. “I’ve decided to keep the place up,” he says, “because I hope to buy it back from the bank.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nationaljournal.com ...
Gosh......he doesn’t trust the schools. the labor unions or the newspapers. Welcome to reality, pal.
Trickle down economics has failed! I’m talking about sending trillions of dollars to Washington and hoping it trickles back in the form of lower mortgage payments and gubment jobs.
So, when he walked away from paying his mortgage, where did he go to live? How much is he paying for rent?
This is the part I don't understand. He has to pay to live someplace. Why not get a roommate and keep making the house payments?
His story makes no sense. He said got a $40,000 house with no money down in 2000, which means he borrowed $40,000. His “monthly payment” is said to be $620.
That means after 10 years, he’d have paid $62,400 into the house. Some of that clearly is insurance and property tax, but what could the property tax be on a $40,000 house? Assuming his insurance is $1000 a year, and property tax is 5%, that’s $3000 a year our of the 7440 per year payment, leaving a payment of $370 a month.
But even at 8% interest, his payment should only have been $300 a month, so it seems his loan couldn’t have been 30 years. It if was 15, he was 5 years from paying off, and would have owed less than half the original cost. And certainly any loan modification would have brought the interest rate to 5%, which would have pretty much assured he’d pay off his loan.
SO how did he have to declare bankruptcy when his wife lost her job? He still should have had a job, his wife should have gotten unemployment, and his monthly payments weren’t all that big.
Also, he actually hired a lawyer. And then ignored his lawyer. Then he “left the keys on the table” and assumed the bank would therefore take his house — but the bank doesn’t own your house unless they take action to do so, and the bank never did. Then he complained that he got fined for not maintaining his property, because he thinks the bank should do it for him.
And he’s angry, at both the right and wrong people. He’s mad that the state which was going broke didn’t keep his wife employed when they didn’t need her. He’s upset nobody changed the rules to make his mortgage easier on him, his own employer for laying him off, and the bank for not cutting his grass for him.
And he lives in a trailer, and I am wondering how that could be so much cheaper than the mortgage on a $40,000 home.
He was the one who convinced America that the Tet Offensive was a victory for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong?
Many of the Founding Fathers did not trust government either. It is a recurrent theme in America, the expansion of power by the government, banks, railroads, pick your historical poison, at the expense of the average citizen. It might be said that it is keeping faith with your country to not be a sheep but to question things.
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