Housing bubble sadness
Today’s saddest Google hit on my blog:
How can I refinance when my house has lost so much value?
That one simple question has so much backstory, and that story is being repeated over and over and over again across the country.
Anyway, son, my answer is: Don’t ask me. Don’t ask blogs. Don’t ask Google. Ask a mortgage company. Ask a consumer credit repair organization (and make sure it’s an organization, not a scam).
The housing market has well and truly tanked. Housing sales are off by 50% year-over-year in parts of California, a drop that hasn’t been seen since they started keeping track of such things. Foreclosures are skyrocketing. In areas where people are stubbornly keeping to their original house price, sales are totally stagnant. The Fed is rumored to be looking at dropping the interest rate. A consortium of (scared witless) banks has gotten together to create a fund to save “structured inventment vehicles”, which are being hammered by the sub-prime mortgage mess.
And the DJIA, after dipping a toe into record territory, has slid backwards this week.
So, no, son, don’t ask me how to refinance now that housing prices are beginning to drop. I’m sorry. I have sympathy, I really do, but at the same time, I really don’t–if you’re in a mortgage mess, you need to take a lesson from this: read your damned mortgage terms before you sign the paper. And think looooong and hard before you agree to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars at some un-predetermined interest rate, gambling on your house’s value to keep rising.
It just doesn’t work that way.
Sorry.
posted in Issues, News, Pop Culture, Sad Stories | 3 Comments
