Basically, you buy a house to live in. Any other reason is speculation, and as such, you bear the burden if your speculation doesn’t pan out.

House prices in Florida are currently 20-30% below what they were before the boom even started.

I came home last week to find my neighbor’s garage and house being picked over by a yard service company who had a service request from the foreclosing bank to mow the lawn. The problem was this property is still occupied, quite obviously, and the while the owner is in foreclosure he has not yet completed the process and still lives there, he has not received the required notice to vacate (his eviction), yet they had issued all these work requests on the address.

A quick chat with the startled perps and I concluded this was business as usual for them and the banks. Don’t forget that even in foreclosure one has rights!

Did that make sense?

To summarise: everything is broken.

No kidding!!!

Why should Jason have to pay for the idiotic mistakes of Bank of America. After this fiasco, it appears Jason should be receiving not only an apology from Bank of America, but also a cash settlement.

sporkinum – Not everything is morally black/white sometimes you get stuck in a clusterfk that is not of your own making.

I bought what I could afford. I was worried about the economy prior to the implosion, so I doubled my payments and paid my house off early (a few months before the crash). I have no idea what my house is worth other than what taxes say. I really don’t care either, as I plan on living in it, not selling it and buying another.

Now, explain to me how it’s the peoples fault for losing their house to forclosure because they got laid off in this crap economy and haven’t been able to find a job that pays anywhere near what they were being paid? If you could easily afford a house before that cost you $1,000 a month becuase you cleared $100,000 a year, how are you going to afford it now that the only you’ve could get is managing a pizza joint? There are people who have been out of their jobs for YEARS now. This far and away exceeds the limits of most people ability to save for.

The banks have convinced us that number 2 is some type of moral failing, but it’s not. It’s a business decision, based on a contract agreed to by both parties.

Banks and businesses screw consumers every day for money, to the point of the original post, but let a consumer turn the tables and suddenly it’s AN OUTRAGE!!

My sister walked away from a house in Florida and it was a very good decision. Why should she pay for a house that’s worth 30% less than what she paid, when she signed a legal contract that gave her another option?

The modern innovation of putting down “only” 20% was introduced by the GI Bill, which underwrote the mortgages of WWII veterans so banks would be willing to give them mortgages for such a large % of the total cost. Prior to that, a down payment usually had to be 80-90% of the purchase cost.

During this most recent housing bubble, down payments were often as low as 5-10%. That leaves almost no room for market fluctuation.

And once the dominoes started to fall, it made it harder for everyone still standing to withstand the damage to their equity.

http://ampedstatus.com/the-road-to-world-war-iii-the-global-banking-cartel-has-one-card-left-to-play

It’s but the first in a series and sourced to the moon, so maybe people would want to give it at least a hard skim and click a few of the many links.

love, 99

Buying a house in 1998 for $94,000 and having that has be currently worth $79,000 because speculators in your state went nuts is not very fair.

Not sure why someone in this forum would lump homeowners who have been in their homes for decades with “speculators”. It’s easy to judge others when you avoided the problem by simple dumb luck.

“Don’t worry. Just keep doing it until it doesn’t make the news.”

Another way to look at it.. Buy a car, it loses $5000 when you drive it off the lot. Now go to the bank and say you want to refinance your car at its current value. I don’t think they would be too accommodating.

That’s not really a problem in my area. There was a small dip in 2008 that has since more than recovered. The long term is still trending up.

http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Cedar_Rapids-Iowa/market-trends/

— George Carlin

In this particular case, it looks like the left hand wasn’t talking to the right hand. The bank agreed to a short sale* by the previous owner after they had initiated the foreclosure process and faild to stop it when the house changed hands.

*A short sale is where the bank voluntarily agrees to release the borrower from their debt in exchange for the (insufficient) proceeds of a sale of the property.

Now, explain to me how it’s the peoples fault for losing their house to forclosure because they got laid off in this crap economy and haven’t been able to find a job that pays anywhere near what they were being paid? If you could easily afford a house before that cost you $1,000 a month becuase you cleared $100,000 a year, how are you going to afford it now that the only you’ve could get is managing a pizza joint? There are people who have been out of their jobs for YEARS now. This far and away exceeds the limits of most people ability to save for.”

No, it’s not their fault and they have my sympathy. That is exactly the reason we accelerated payments and paid the house off. It was difficult to do though. We quit going out to eat, buying stuff, etc. The economy was looking sketchy and I wanted to make sure I was in a good position to weather it. With a paid off house, I can flip burgers and still get by.

Now the issue is that due to the speculation of some (a small percentage), and the outright fraud of mortgage-backed securities, turned the basic stable investment (the house), that was one of the safest types of investments around, into speculation, sometimes long after the people who invested in the house made the decisions to do so.

This has nothing to do with “I thought I paid a fair price” and everything to do with “the bad behavior of some has devalued the investments of all of us”.