Reply #58: I agree, Pithlet [View All]

[Tansy_Gold]

There's a real "I got mine and I'm okay, so it must be those who are in difficult straits got there because they were greedy/stupid/didn't do their homework/whatever" attitude.

Never, ever, ever blame the corporation that suckered them in.

I damn near lost my almost-paid-for house last year when my husband died of lung cancer. Life sometimes throws you a curve. Same thing with the couple portrayed in the OP's article -- life threw them a curve in the form of the Iraq "war" that took away a job and an income they were counting on. Who knows what might have happened if these people were able to keep their income, pay off one of those ARMs (one might have been short-term, essentially a down-payment), and go on with the rest of their payments? But because life threw them a knuckleball, it's their own fault??? I don't get it.

The lenders who took advantage of them always make out and are never blamed for anything. Not in my book: any lender who takes advantage of someone, who puts the borrower in an unreasonably risky situation, is every bit to blame. The lender will always come out ahead -- they'll end up owning the property.

When I went through hell with a large, well-known bank trying to get the mortgage I eventually decided I didn't want, I told them flat out, "Look, you're getting a $500,000 house as security for a $100,000 loan, so what's your problem?" Their response was, "We're not in the real estate business." I laughed and said, "Then why don't you give me the money as an unsecured loan?" They didn't think it was so funny.

Is anyone trying to suggest that these people who are losing everything somehow defrauded the poor, innocent banks that lent them the money? Is anyone accusing these people of buying a property they knew would decline in value over the period they would own it and using an inflated value to screw the mortgage company? Give me a break!

We've all seen people lose their homes via a host of unforeseen disasters, whether it's the collapse of Enron or another megacorp, through the changing job market, through natural disasters, through the general catastrophe that is the boooosh administration. And we usually have some sympathy for them because it looks like they've worked hard and tried to make their payments and build up equity in their home. Well, so did these people. It just happened that the disaster hit them before they had time to build up that equity. So do we fault them for not having done whatever it was they did sooner? Again, I don't think so.

The system screwed them far more than they screwed themselves. They were trying to buy into the same American dream a lot of us did.

I was very lucky. I had enough insurance (not much, but enough) to pay off the mortgage. Furthermore, I was lucky enough to price the house just right and find a buyer at just the right time. Was I smarter than the average seller? I don't know. But I do know that my realtor was closing one and sometimes two sales a week right up until my sale closed the end of March, and then she didn't close another one for almost two months. That's how dramatically the market changed.

So when I read about situations like this, I know damn well that there but for the grace of whatever god or gods exist go I.

Tansy Gold