What A Mess.....

From BLOGS_IMAGES

This is a 'guest' blog from a friend of mine. He originally posted this on his Facebook page and it is reprinted here with his permission.

Gene is a great guy. He is a divorced father that cares for his handicapped daughter and throws exceptional Super Bowl Parties at his home as well as heading down to Mexico with us once in a while. He is the sort of guy you want to have as your neighbor.

Over the past several months, I have been somewhat mystified at the number of people I know who were looking to buy a home, usually the homes are in the process of a short sale or about to be foreclosured on by the bank. Most of these home buyers have exceptional credit and hefty down payments for the property, yet almost all of the sales fall through and the homes go into foreclosure anyway. It made no sense at all since the banks are losing tons of money on these forclosures.....or so you might think, until I read Gene's story about loosing his home. It is lengthy, but I highly recommend you read it.

Read on and find out the real story of just how screwed up our society really is.....



Losing a House, not a Home

by Gene HXXXXXXX on Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 10:31pm


A lot of friends have picked up on several comments I've made over the last few weeks - and more have questions....and as it turns out, we're losing our house through foreclosure - it's scheduled to be sold next week at auction.

Which surprises a lot of people - knowing that I've had a great job since February of this year. And it all happened so fast. Turns out, it's happening to a lot of people, and although it's a tad embarrassing personally, I think this says much about what is happening to our country right now - thus this note.

I mean, really, how can someone make six figures and have the house go into foreclosure?

Here's how.

2009 was a disaster in my industry - businesses worried about the cost of rising taxes, employee health costs under Obamacare, who would be pilloried next for political purposes - and everyone just held back on any spending on software.

As such, entire divisions of companies were downsized - I got caught in that, and was unemployed for 11 months.

I fell behind in everything, including mortgage payments. I was working with all of my creditors, and kept most bills either current or was a month or at most 60 days behind. Eventually, a guy I knew from the past called me up and offered a job with a major company in an area where I'd done exceptionally well in the past.

I was catching up...and along came HAMP - Home Affordable Mortgage Program - or some such rot. My mortgage company contacted me and said that I could qualify for this program and they could rewrite my loan at a lower interest rate. I was interested.

While they went through the paperwork, they told me that my payments would drop - but they couldn't tell me exactly how much. Three weeks seemed to be the magic time period. As in, "We don't know what your payment will be, but in three weeks, we'll have the paperwork done and you can make your payments starting then."

I'd call back in three weeks and they'd have lost the paperwork and I'd resubmit. I finally learned to FedEx what they'd asked me to fax, and when they claimed they hadn't received everything, I'd have a tracking receipt and who signed for it. Weeks turned into months.

Then Wilshire Mortgage went out of business and sold their loans to Countrywide. OK. Start over, new paperwork. FedEx'd this time from the beginning. Three weeks til I'd start paying the mortgage again.

In the meantime, I'd paid off every debt, every credit card - I was left with a car payment and $100 student loan from the MBA - call back in three weeks. But despite numerous attempts to make a payment on the mortgage, I was repeatedly told “just wait three weeks”.

Then the loan was sold to BoA - Bank of A**holes - I mean Bank of America (they should be sued for soiling that name). Start over with the paperwork. Talking to endless groups. I could call one person, get hung up on trying to transfer to another division, call back and be told that the division I was transferring to hadn't existed for months - it was maddening. But as of October 4th, we were working on modifying the loan. I was told to call back on Oct 6 - when I did, I was told my home was being sold in a foreclosure sale October 15 - 9 days notice.

Here's what I found out. Congress passed a bill that would give homeowners additional tools to avoid foreclosure - that happened the first week in Oct - Obama was expected to sign it, but decided to pocket-veto the bill - BoA brass (and other banks) issued the order to foreclose everything they could before that bill became law. All the banks pulled the plug on hundreds of thousands of loan modifications. Except now politics really come into play - Ally Bank (formerly GMAC) was leading the charge of foreclosures. Majority ownership of Ally Bank is the US Government. Obama was faced with hundreds of thousands of foreclosures three weeks before a major election. This would not do. In a political stroke of genius, they came up with the 'robo-signing' controversy and instituted the foreclosure moratorium you may have heard about in the news.

It bought us two weeks.

Our foreclosure was moved from Oct 15 to Nov 5 (just after the Nov 2 elections).

But it still didn't make sense.

I was trying to modify the loan and pay for a $370K loan. At short sale, the house would bring $230K for BoA. In foreclosure sale, they'd get about $150K.

And talking to the Real Estate Attorney, BoA was turning down HUNDREDS of short sales to go to foreclosure.

Today I learned about the Barney Frank/Chris Dodd "Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act". You'll remember Chris Dodd as the congressman who got those no-money down low interest loans from Countrywide. And Barney Frank campaigned to stop oversight of the Fannie/Freddie organizations that led to the housing bubble – and surprise, banks are the major contributors to his re-election campaign.

But as it turns out, BoA has insured the loans through Fannie and Freddie. When they foreclose, your tax dollars pay BoA the full amount of the mortgage - in other words, instead of modifying my mortgage and having it paid back over thirty years, BoA can foreclose today, and get the entire $370K from your tax dollars RIGHT NOW. Profits soar. Bank executives make millions in bonuses.

So if you're still with me on this, people have asked - do you blame Obama and the Dems for losing your house? Answer, No - I really don't. For one, if I blamed Obama, he'd only blame Bush and that would help nothing. Secondly, if a pollster asked if I was disappointed in Obama's performance as President, I'd have to say, No - he's just about what you'd expect from someone who's never accomplished anything save writing two books (on himself) and running campaigns for political office.

So who do I blame? Mostly me for believing what the banks said. But if I had to blame anyone other than my own dumb self, I'd pretty much have to blame my dear friends who voted for Obama. I've talked to several of them about it. They can't really tell you why they voted for the anointed one, other than Republicans are evil, full of hate, racist, etc. They know this because the media (Democrat operatives) told them so. They can't show a single example of where Obama's socialist policies have succeeded, nor give you any reason why they think he will succeed other than they hate Repubs. But of course the Repubs are the party of hate and intolerance. And that won't be tolerated.

What I tell them is this, I lost my 401K last year when I was unemployed. I lost my home this year when I was 'helped' by liberal lawmaking. I got nothing left - but I tell them, If YOU have anything left, you might want to protect it and actually vote like an adult who examines the facts for themselves instead of buying spoon fed propaganda from a media with an agenda.

I'm just saying.

As for me, I'm doing just fine. We found a great rental house at a lower cost. (Turns out there's thousands of empty houses once you get those middle class Repubs foreclosed the heck out of ‘em). And I have the faith thing going on - - as powerful as the statist government is, God is more in control than you could know - and He has a much better place for us - and I'd rather be right with Him in a tent than miserable in a castle without Him.