20th October 2007

Housing bubble sadness

posted in Issues, News, Pop Culture, Sad Stories |

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.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 20th, 2007 at 11:17 am and is filed under Issues, News, Pop Culture, Sad Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 3 responses to “Housing bubble sadness”

  1. 1 On October 20th, 2007, del said:

    I get a lot of google hits for stuff like that on my blog, too.

    One thing I’d like to know is just how many people are actually victims of unscrupulous lenders and how many just watched a couple of episodes of “Flip That House” and gambled on a “sure thing”. I’ve been a housing bear since late 2005 and two of my then newly minted homeowner friends just looked at me like I was crazy when I said maybe something was wrong with the housing market. I’d explain about economic supply/demand concepts and they’d just nod their heads and stare blankly like I was speaking a foreign language. You could see dollar signs flashing in their eyes and dreams of early retirement flittering around. It was like talking to a brainwashed cult member or something.

    Of course, one was forced to refinance at a much higher rate late last year and is now living paycheck to paycheck. The other will almost certainly lose her condo next year when her ARM loan resets. Both were banking on rapid appreciation to help them get out at a big profit.

    I have sympathy for the ones who were legitimately duped by criminals. But I suspect that there are (comparatively) few real victims of mortgage fraud out there. The rest were like my two friends and got caught up in bubble mania and made stupid decisions. Now they’re paying the price.

    Of course they’ll never say that they were greedy and didn’t think about the risks. That’d be too much like taking responsibility for one’s own actions and we just don’t do that in America. So it’s harsh but I have zero sympathy for them: they spun the wheel of fortune and lost. They should’ve known better than to sign something they didn’t fully understand, especially when for most it was the biggest financial decision of their lives.

  2. 2 On October 21st, 2007, carosgram said:

    I am always amazed that people don’t seem to understand that ’speculating on the stock exchange or in real estate’ is gambling. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. If you don’t understand the rules of the game, you definitely will lose. The odds always favor the ‘house’ that is the banks, agents, and mortgage brokers. Don’t gamble if you can’t afford to lose is the first rule of speculation. I bought a house to live in, not to make money on. I bought a house I could afford, not one to make my neighbors green with envy. It is furnished mostly with hand-me-downs which provide me with daily reminders of my parents, grandparents and some friends. I’ll never make the pages of House Beautiful but no one is dunning me on the phone. I am not rich, never will be rich and I am ok with that. I don’t feel a need to pretend I am. I don’t envy those you have more and I don’t wish them ill. That is just the way life is. I have more than I ever thought I would and I am grateful. Luckily Thanksgiving is coming and I am in the proper mood. Hope your holiday in the Great North is wonderful!

  3. 3 On October 23rd, 2007, Spacemom said:

    Ah- And then people like my sister are duped. To consolidate credit card bills, they refinianced. At the closing, the lender changed the rates, and fees. The lawyer was hired by the company that was providing the mortagage. They told my sister and her husband that they were in a legal agreement and HAD to close at this rate or face incredible fines and/or court dates.
    Incredible.
    I was sick when she told me about this, but they felt too terrible to actually fight this.
    I wonder how many people are in this trouble.

    In the Boston area, many single women were taken advantage of. When the mortgage lawyers start to encourage people to take out a larger loan than they can afford, when do you decide that this is a crime? Many people who are foreclosing here in the Boston area were oversold on how much they could buy, and now they are losing their homes. Unfortunately, it is not all “let’s get a big screeen TV and use the refinance for that” it is alot of “We could move here for our kids, but the market is so expensive….” and the lawyers saying “The property will appreciate!” If a lawyer says it, it must be true, right? At least some people feel that way…

    It’s a sad situation everywhere

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