She was not tricked. She did not pay attention.

>> ^Boise_Lib:

>> ^kevingrr:
Tricked by credit cards? Fooled by student loans? Cheated on mortgages?
Seriously?
The only trick is that people want what they can't afford. Good consumers, bad savers.

So very, very wrong.
My mother was tricked by a credit card company. She thought she had an 18% interest rate--until I looked into it and found she actually had 30% interest because they tricked her by changing it.

>> ^kevingrr:

Tricked by credit cards? Fooled by student loans? Cheated on mortgages?
Seriously?
The only trick is that people want what they can't afford. Good consumers, bad savers.


So very, very wrong.

My mother was tricked by a credit card company. She thought she had an 18% interest rate--until I looked into it and found she actually had 30% interest because they tricked her by changing it.

Tricked by credit cards? Fooled by student loans? Cheated on mortgages?


Seriously?

The only trick is that people want what they can't afford. Good consumers, bad savers.

Luckys' got good points which most-likely apply to your situation-➊FHA's own site has all the information to put you 2 steps abreast of anything most mortgage lenders know.You may believe me, I was a realtor for 4 years during the pre-bubble and most only know what they need to to secure your business.

Best thing to beware of with a lender is their enthusiasm. Meaning, they should be more enthusiastic about explaining the details of the loan than landing your business.

In choosing a realtor, again, what are they enthusiastic about, explaining each step of the process and all the variables involved for a first-time buyer, or simply trying to get you to sign on with them and show you houses? The first thing they should do is secure you a lender whose reputation has remained virtually un-sullied after this last market crash.


➊ http://www.fha.com/fha_loan_requirements.cfm

Buy some land???

Even in a fantasy world you have to buy land?

What about a mortgage then?

FHA loans are good for a couple of reasons, the most important being that they allow people who can't qualify for a conventional loan to buy a home.

Specifically, FHA makes it possible by allowing two very important things: 1) you can use a 5% down payment instead of 20%, and 2) you can have a very high (~54%) debt-to-income ratio.

The downsides of an FHA loan are that you have to be buying an FHA-approved property (but this usually isn't an issue) and also you have to pay mortgage insurance.

The only reason not to use an FHA loan is that your debt-to-income is not an issue and you are able to put 20% down.

Good luck with the home purchase. Now's a good time to buy, especially with the 30-year-fixed FHA interest rate about 3.5%.

I know what you mean. I was hesitant.

The only reason I did it was because of the nature of the crime (arson to avoid paying a mortgage) which is cowardly, followed by suicide ONLY when he was found guilty. If he had gotten away with it, presumably he would still be alive.

A perverse posting garnering perverse upvotes. Makes sense to me.


>> ^deathcow:

too snuffy for me
perversely upvoted but not something i want en masse on the sift

And a lot of the debt relief stuff in the US is designed to help a very small percentage of people. Plus you know..the whole false mortgage defaults and illegal evictions taking place more or less unchecked. Using the government to facilitate their business when it's often not legal to do so. But no one says wait a minute....maybe this shouldn't be happening. Like so many things in the finance industry and economy overall. I don't think either presidential possibility will do this, but I highly doubt R-Money is going to balk at more of it happening.

>> ^FlowersInHisHair:

>> ^AeroMechanical:
>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
I'm starting to not get new pop culture references. Does this mean I'm getting old?
http://pinterest.com/

Oh, no. Of course not. It means you are an adult. That usually takes until at least 30 these days at a minimum.
edit: Almost as soon as I wrote that, I realized the logical fallacy. Truth be told, in all likelihood, the 25-year-olds I know today who still play Pokemon and watch Naruto will never really become adults. I suppose maybe that isn't a bad thing though.
So being an adult means you can't like fun stuff any more? Fuck that!


That's about the size of it. Instead, you have to get all excited about mortgage rates and how much your job matches you on your 401K. Then you have kids, which people say is a lot of fun, but looks more like stress and a lot of work to me.

The other day, a friend of mine said he didn't need to smoke ganja any more because when his baby daughter smiles, it's better than any drug. I just about puked.

FTW>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

Give it up. Obama is a just another crook.
Thousands of people have had their homes foreclosed on. Had their lives ruined based on that choice.
And you're going to suggest that Obama had some valid reason for refusing to help the people that need help the most?!
The very people he explicitly campaigned to help?

Are you deluding yourself cause it's fun?
Or cause you're too upset/depressed to acknowledge the truth?
>> ^Edgeman2112:
So instead of trying to find out "WHY," you just go on some rant. I'm done with you.

>> ^Edgeman2112:

So instead of trying to find out "WHY," you just go on some rant. I'm done with you.


When you are done with your extensive research please inform me of the White House's internal strategies and the President's personal motivations.

>> ^lantern53:

When Bush was president, Krugman opposed financial bailouts.
Now that Obama is president, he changed his mind. We aren't spending enough.
So...


Citation needed.

Krugman, as he states in the video, felt the bailouts were necessary, but that the "other side" (I.e. mortgage reform) was missing.

Temporarily waving the requirement to have 20% equity to refinance at a lower rate will only put us back into the position we used to be in. If people can't pay a mortgage, it's still no use. It's likely better for the individual family to leave instead of paying for a property that had its value slashed.

That, and the loss will be put on the back of the taxpayer. The bank won't take it.

@renatojj

Politicians don't have their hands all over businesses, it's the opposite. Businesses have their hands in the strings that direct the politicians. Which means politicians are not serving society, but serving businesses. There are many examples of things happening that you know are wrong and can see are wrong, but nothing ever happens...why? Because businesses are either making money on them or mitigating money loss by it happening.

Look at nuclear power regulations, they have been loosened and the inspectors are actually limited in what they can inspect so much so that they don't actually see more than 5 or 10% of the workings of a nuclear plant. How can they say something is safe if they see less than 10% of it and those 10% don't even allow them to do tests they used to do?

Oil company regulation, why did the BP oil spill happen? It was because they are not held to standards damn near every other country on the planet holds them to. And when you see more into it, many times the oil inspection agents were going to work for the oil company when they retired. And yet they rarely busted their balls on questionable things and got caught with their pants down many times with not catching violations.....so they probably weren't hired for their inside knowledge on how to best keep the existing equipment up to standards....since they aren't being held to them.


And as for the last post you made...you can't just drop regulation on all of these things. There's countless reasons for it but I'll try to list a few.

1) They basically hold a monopoly in many industries or a small number of very large companies that end up basically being a monopoly, so there would be no counter balance of a free market because the market has never been free to begin with. If it were truly free there'd be 100/1000/10000/100k/1mil businesses in these industries all competing on either features or price because they should all be about as reliable as one another...since we always have to picture the "perfect" free market. I'll bet you can name a couple people who have shit internet service pretty easy or pay a lot for very little.

2) You are putting the policing of industries in the industry hands if you dial back regulation. They already can not regulate themselves. How many companies supported SOPA and now how many more support CISPA? They do what's best for them and they do it cooperatively not independently. That's why you have groups formed of these companies putting bills forward that are basically passed nearly word for word if edited at all by congress critters.

3) We hear all the time about businesses only responsibility is to make money. We don't even hold a person to that standard, an individual has more responsibilities than that...earning a living is probably in the top ten but it's not your sole major responsibility as a member of society. Number 1 could arguably be "obey the law" or "don't be a dick". Business number 1 should probably be don't negatively impact people as your business model....this could be not polluting, keeping a safe work environment, not overworking people, making underhanded deals in the name of profit, making deals you know you will back out of or have no intention to honor, etc. Yes shit happens, but you shouldn't make your business model based on making shit happen to profit. Banks and financial institutes arguably did this with bad mortgages and false rating of these mortgages when selling them.

@messenger

It's not just bribing politicians, but businesses openly courting people for employment after their term of service or the people regulating them. It makes it more profitable to be lenient and not enforce regulations or laws on companies when you'll be making 3x your salary when you go to work for them after kissing their ass for a decade or two. Both the bribes and the business tie ins with Haliburton made the early days of the current war seem pretty shady when you look specifically at Dick Cheney. But it happens with advisors to people in office as well, it's something that really should be stopped because government should be about public service and not service with the intention of landing a sweet gig at some company you helped make a few billion dollars for awhile a public servant.

You can't stop it entirely, but there should definitely be some lawful punishments put in place to make it have to cost the companies exorbitant amounts to court people to court them with the severe punishments placed on people who stray too far from the path. Like prison terms or fines to the tune of percentages of their life savings and 25% of a company's value if they are caught. Unfortunately, the people who would put forth these laws are the same people who would be directly affected by them....because they are all business owners anymore...it costs too much money to get into office and rich people are the only people who tend to have the wealth/power to pull it off.

So......regulations on companies it the best you can hope for, make it so politicians can't offer them anything worth the huge donations they make to these people because regulations would make the attempts worthless, unless of course it was deregulation. Which they've already done and continue to do, to the detriment of all. Profits are up for all the big companies sometimes higher than pre-crash, and yet they employ less people than they did 5 years ago. How are they pulling THAT off....they are cutting corners or doing something shady somewhere to keep earning like that despite being less capable of producing like they did prior when a lot more people had disposable income.

Did you not read what I wrote? I'm pretty sure I said the national debt is a problem. My issue with you is your rationale for the national debt is overly simplistic and utterly ridiculous. OH NOEZ! The average taxpayer owes 137K if the national debt is broken down per taxpayer, and the overwhelming majority of Americans don't have 137K lying around to pay that. Say, do most Americans have 50K laying around? No. So if the debt were cut in third roughly, surely it wouldn't be a problem. See? The rationale doesn't hold up. Most Americans don't have 10K laying around either, but if that were the debt per taxpayer, the national debt wouldn't be a problem. Not to mention the fact that wealth is concentrated in this country, too. Granted, most people don't have 137K laying around, but you know who has millions upon millions laying around? Guys like Warren Buffett, Mitt Romney, etc. etc. The stat you threw out doesn't mean a damn thing. It just sounds bad.

That's the kind of crap that makes discussing something like this with you utterly impossible. You don't care if the national debt is truly a problem. You WANT it to be a big problem that must be dealt with immediately, and THE ONLY WAY to deal with it is... survey says... reduce spending. NO TAX INCREASES!!! EVER!!!

It's a pointless discussion. You've already made up your mind the national debt is a problem that must be dealt with like a crisis, with only one way to deal with it. Any rational person would look at this issue and conclude that even if it is huge problem, (which by the way, since you can't apparently read, I DO think it's a problem, but does not need to be dealt with in extreme measures, or unilaterally with spending cuts only) cutting spending isn't the only solution. I also know that we've run up historical deficits in our past and came out the other end a stronger nation. I also know that the vast majority of the current deficit has been caused by the Iraqi and Afghan wars, by the Bush tax cuts (which actually caused more debt than those wars did, and a collapsing economy.

Comparison between POLICIES of Bush vs Obama as contributors to the national debt:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24editorial_graph2/24editorial_graph2-popup.gif

Sorry, but that's the truth. The reality is we spent ourselves out in two wars and cutting taxes to ridiculous proportions.

As a side note, I just did my taxes. I'm married with no kids, my wife doesn't work due to medical reasons. I make $122,000/yr in a lower than average cost of living area. You know what my effective federal tax rate was? 10%! How in the hell can the federal gov't do what it needs to do when I'm paying 10% effective federal tax rate?! It's absurd. And it's not like I was hell bound to escape paying taxes. My deductions? $5000 in wife's traditional IRA contribution, state income taxes, mortgage interest, and some charitable donations. I benefited also from 401k contributions and a Flexible Spending Account program.

Unless you're willing to go on record and say GDP cannot be raised significantly from where it is today in the next 5 years, which would increase tax revenues to make up for much of the deficits we're running today, you don't have a leg to stand on. I'm not in favor of cutting any gov't spending that would jeopardize significantly economic growth in the short run. Therefore, I don't think we can cut a whole lot of spending right now, and we'll unfortunately have to run very large deficits in the short run. However, once the economy grows significantly, we will need to cut spending at that point, and run substantial surpluses for awhile to get the debt more manageable again.

That is what we've done in the past, and it worked when facing very severe economic downturns. Call me crazy, but I look at history and see what worked, and follow that path.

>> ^bobknight33:

From you example of going into debt for war sake is a nice comparison. In today's terms we spent 1 trillion on the Bush war and and a fair amount on Obama continuation of the wars. If we were only in 1 - 2 trillion of debt that's one thing but we are hitting 16 Trillion dollars of debt. That is a whole different kind of debt.
Like I said earlier our government has currently cause each of us to incur a bill of 50K per man woman and child or 137K per taxpayer. Who of us can pay that debt back? Not Me and surly not you.

You basically don't see this as a problem so I ask you when does it become a problem?