If you lied on your mortgage application I will gi

[coadie]

Originally Posted by Maximilian

Coming from the banking side, I can assure you it wasn't always "lying" going on. The banking side lenders would sometimes do all they could do to push through a loan to their underwriters.

Everyone was in on this. Banks, consumers, government... EVERYONE.

On the market side, the CDO's were bundled and sold in tranches with often understated risk.

[canam]

Originally Posted by Sam

Is he also the one that was Barney Frank's lover?

That would have been Herb Moses, who was also a CEO with Fannie Mae,which explains Barney's passionate defense of Fannie.Barnie never liked anyone probing his private life but Sarah Palins private life was up for grabs and fair game according BF.Magine that !

[coadie]

Originally Posted by canam

That would have been Herb Moses, who was also a CEO with Fannie Mae,which explains Barney's passionate defense of Fannie.Barnie never liked anyone probing his private life but Sarah Palins private life was up for grabs and fair game according BF.Magine that !

Probing, not so much. It is quicker to make it up.

[geekette]

Originally Posted by MissBrattified

Yes, and there are also people who have lost their jobs and can no longer pay what they could 2-3 years ago when they filled out their loan applications. Jeff was laid off in April 2009, (a scant 16 months after we bought our first home) and it was scary for a little while. Only by the grace of God and my husband's hard work did we manage to keep ourselves afloat.

Being upside down on a loan or losing a house altogether doesn't always reflect badly on the homeowner, and judgment should be withheld until all the facts are known. (Something some people aren't good at.)

I'm upside down on my house. The 2011 assessed value is 28 percent of the mortgage. The guy in the next cube over has an assessed value of 46 percent of his mortgage.

Up until now, my dad has been urging me to hang in there, etc., etc. He thinks I'd walk away--not hardly, I work for a financial institution and at my age I don't want to destroy my credit. However, this shocked him immensely and he has urged me to ask my lender for either a principal modification or an interest rate modification.

However, because I have a job and can make my payments I cannot qualify for any of the existing programs. I'd have to write to the lender and ask it to give me a modification based on the sheer fact that the house they have on their books is not worth what they originally loaned on it, and, in fact, should be written down. And, for all I know, my house may have been already written down, but given what a mess the mortgage system is in right now, there would be no way to tell.

Let me be clear: I have no intention or desire to walk away from my home. But I'm thinking that I should go to the lender and ask it for a modification, because there is little chance the house is ever going to be worth what I paid for it--and because I know the lender is going to eventually have to take a writedown anyway.

Do you all think it's unethical to ask the lender for a modification?

[Sam]

I live in the city of Forest Park, OH.
We are about 15 miles north of Cincinnati and have a population of about 20,000. I don't know the latest numbers but in the 2000 census we were about 56 percent African American and 35 percent white. Several years ago there was a strong effort to "steer" African American home buyers to this area to keep some of the other areas in the Greater Cincinnati area "white." Consequently there was a lot of "white flight" and housing values in Forest Park are lower than in some of the surrounding areas.

Now, with the problems of housing sales and mortgages, housing values have dropped even lower. For the first quarter of 2009 I kept a spread sheet of property transfers in Forest Park. These are reported in the local news papers and the appraised property values and transfer price information is available through the County Auditor's web site. For the first three months of 2009 the average transfer price was 61 percent of the appraised value. I have no idea if that has changed since then or not.

[Jermyn Davidson]

Originally Posted by pelathais

And there are many other different circumstances. I wouldn't say that everyone who is in trouble now is guilty of "theft" or wrong doing. Sure, there's plenty of that. But I think most folks who are hurting are just plain hurting and not "bad guys" who tried to defraud a bank.

Exactly.

Some people never want to admit that sometimes, bad things happen to good people-- even when they do everything right.

[Brad Murphy]

But at the same time, some people are more careful/cautious than others and would never sign an ARM due to knowing what could happen if things were to go south... I would have walked out of the title company if the only way I could get a loan was via an ARM.

Bad things do happen to good people, and even to good people that are careful... but I imagine they happen to good people who are careful less often than to those who aren't careful.