Posted on 05/10/2010 6:26:23 AM PDT by blam
There is (or at least, was) a flaw in the credit reporting services.
My friend used to do a great deal of travel for his company. Most months, he’d have a several-thousand-dollar balance on his credit card, which he’d pay off in full each time. He, of course was reimbursed for all of this.
But he got slightly down-rated by the credit bureaus because every time they sampled his card balances, they were high. Their system was blind to the fact that the balance was never a carry-over from a previous month and was always paid off with no interest accruing.
Yeah well thats sort of along my line of thinking. I detest moving, I have to live somewhere, and I like my home.
And you are right.. a good credit score in the future might not mean much.. especially after all this is over. I was thinking along the lines of people who walk away, only to never be able to buy another house in the future.
How hard is that?
Even if you make payment on that 50cents and you only make 2cents per week, is that item really worth it.
I always had a rule of thumb when working hourly. Price of item say $25.00. I was only making 50cent per hour. How many hours did I have to work to purchase that $25 item? you say 50 hours, I don't need it that bad.
Thinking that way, I could always walk away from my WANTS.
Shop around. Different banks have different contracts. I switched from a bank that held me responsible for the first $50 of fraud, reserved the right to hold funds while they investigated etc. My current bank guarantees that my funds will be returned within 24 hours, even on weekends.
Except that never happens. On the periphery of the family, we have a nere-do-well relative who's declared bankruptcy at least three times that I know about, lost a house each time, and she just bought another. Ditto for a guy at work that just bought a house despite being forcibly evicted from his last house when we hired him 6 years ago. These black marks seem to fade quickly.
“How much sense does it take to know if you only have 25cents in your pocket you can’t afford that 50 cent item??”
How much sense does it make to loan someone the extra 25 cents?
Remember the banks were pushing the credit mentality. They employed vast marketing efforts and behavioral analysis to entice people to live off credit cards. This was the message many people wanted to hear.
The banks are just as culpable as the borrowers. They lent based on bubble real estate value in states that do not allow collection for deficiency judgments. It is disengennious for them to now claim that people who do not have a legal obligation to them beyond giving them the home somehow have an “ethical” obligation to them. Sorry Charlie.
“Shop around. Different banks have different contracts”
They all have provisions for the bank to dispute that its fraud. If the bank does not agree they have a couple months to figure it out. Meanwhile your funds are tied up.
Debit cards are NOT the same as credit cards and they carry additional consumer risk.
Try this one on for size.
I was listening to a call in show on legal matters yesterday (Handel on the law?).
Guy calls up and he took out a second on his current house so he could buy a second home in Mexico.
First question:
“If I walk away from my mortgage can they go after my house in Mexcico”.
Answer: Theoretically but probably not as a purely practical matter. (that was the host’s opinion).
Second question:
“If I walk away from my mortgage and declare bankruptcy can I still stay in my current house?”
Answer: Huh? No Pal. Declaring bankruptcy is NOT going to keep them from taking your house.
This genius thought he could simply declare bankruptcy, stop making payments on his mortgages but still stay in the house he was not going to make payments on anymore just by virtue of saying “Bankrupt”.
“nonsense, they have no liablity for that under law good throught 2012. If they had a bankruptcy it is gone.”
You assume they had a BK.
“Banks hate it when they have to accept the risk of doing business. They just want the profit side.”
That is exactly why banks are bitching. They only want profit and no risk. There was a reason banks used to be careful.
No matter how good it sounds, and I have a big case of the WANTS, it is up to me to see what they are trying to do. I walk away, that does not take much in the way of common sense.
But the Bank CHOSE to lend under terms (required by law) stating that the borrower can either pay the fulkl loan or give the house to the bank as full payment.
“It is still up to the individuale to determine the truth of what they cannot afford.”
Sure it is. If it were my money I would do some due diligence before lending it to someone. The banks did not do that because of greed.
It has more to do than just wants. Millions of people have lost their jobs. Millions of those jobs have been shipped overseas never to return.
Our govt and large companies are shipping our financial worth out of the country as fast as they can. That will have an impact and it will not be business as usual here.
So the bankers get their money back no matter what fraud and lies they promulgated. and the risk gets transferred to the poor and naive. Nice system you got there. Screw you.
The rest of you statements are now getting into a wider area, yet it still boils down to individual responsibility. No Banker in the world can FORCE anyone to sign the dotted line. NONE. It is a matter of WANTS.
Am I for the bankers, yes. Each are in the business of making money, (as is the place where you work), it is how they play the game you are responsible for, as stated above No one forces me to sign or agree to anything.
Preparing for the worst What ifs, has always been in my budget. Buy less of what you need, save the differance for the worst that life may bring.
The only case I can see where people can get into Real trouble is a Catastrophic health issue, no one can foresee those things. Those credit problems can and should be forgiven.
An old saying: Plan as if you will live forever, live as if you will die today. That means planning your finances, I always had a BIG WHAT IF (something bad happens) before I made a big purchase.
Privatize the gains, socialize the risks....wonderful.
I suspect the government would be right in my face telling me who I MUST rent to.
Did you even read my post? I never said a single damn thing about the bankers or money! This is about a legal contract!
You’re arguing from the “rich banker” mentality; I’m arguing from the legal side. You have a job, sir? If you violate a policy at your job, say you bring a gun to work, aren’t you going to get fired? Do you honestly think that telling your HR rep that you’ve fallen on hard times and need to carry a gun is going to let you keep your job? You signed a CONTRACT to work for that company, just like these people signed a CONTRACT to borrow money. Forget that it’s a home, what if it’s a car or a credit card? Do you think it’s acceptable to not pay back a credit card or the loan on a car if you’ve “fallen on hard times?”
C’mon! You’re thinking with an excessively emotional mindset. This is about cut and dry laws, not about money!
And as a secondary thought on this:
I read every last word on every page of my mortgage. I knew exactly what I was getting into. I would not settle for anything less than a 30-year fixed mortgage. No balloons, no ARMs, no shenanigans.
You’re arguing that because someone didn’t understand or didn’t read the contract they signed, they should be exempt from repayment, and that’s just plain daffy! If the bankers write screwy or unethical laws into their contracts, that’s for the legal system to work out, but these are not cases of mortgage lender abuse, these are cases of folks signing up for something they couldn’t afford to perform upon!
If they read the paperwork and were leery of the wording, they should’ve hired a real estate lawyer; that’s why they’re there!
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