Wonkette
Criminy! We have been hearing a lot about mortgages that go into default or foreclosure, and how the people holding these mortgages should talk with their lenders about renegotiating their loans. As a normal person with more than two (2) neurons flickering on and off in your brain, you probably assume that the goal here is to make the loans more affordable, which is to say, LOWER IN COST. Apparently banks sometimes disagree.
Observe our exhibits A and B. Exhibit A is a nice lady on a fixed income who was getting some support from her brother, but then her brother couldn’t help her anymore and she was having a hard time affording her monthly mortgage payment. So she called up her bank and said, “Sorry, no monies,” and the bank lowered her interest rate by 3.3 percent, thus lowering her payments, and she is happy and not homeless and the bank doesn’t have to worry about selling off her house at a loss.
Exhibit B is a guy who needs to lower his payments, so he calls his bank, Wells Fargo, and they agree to lower his rate by a princely .4 percent. They charge him enough in fees and penalties that his payment remains exactly the same. Naturally, he has already gone into default again.
Smaller companies like Ocwen that are under more financial pressure and have more experience in dealing with higher-cost loans have been most aggressive in lowering payments, said Mr. Dubitsky, the Credit Suisse analyst. Big banks like Wells Fargo, which would need to be retooled to emphasize modifications over foreclosures, appear to favor modifications that do not lower payments or debts very much.
Well jesus fucking christ, what exactly is the point of a loan modification if it does not lower payments or debt very much? What kind of a moron works at a bank and looks across the desk at somebody who is destitute and nearly homeless and says, “Let’s lower your interest rate but make up the difference in fees”?
Also, note that exhibits A and B are both located in South Florida. Thus: move Wells Fargo to South Florida, saw off everything from Fort Myers down, and let this Island of Doom float away forever.
Modifying Mortgages Can Be Tricky [New York Times]
When did “the market” become a euphemism for Screw Poor People Over? Oh right, it’s always been that way.
“What kind of a moron”… I’d say a 19 on the “Most Evil” scale.
I am sure that Wells Fargo would prefer loan modifications that resulted in the homeowner giving the home to the bank but also doubling payments AND giving free Lamborghinis to Wells Fargo executive.
…hey, hey, hey SKS, I LIVE IN SOUTH FLORIDA! Why would you get rid of the non-redneck part of Florida? Besides what would you guys do without your token angry(and drunk)black guy?!
Stupid banks. Better to get something than Nothing. After the meth heads rip out the wiring, the hobos leave shit and piss in the corner and teenagers have their pot parties there then what’s the fucking point in selling it?
It’s a big (actually ginormous) shit sandwich and we’re all gonna have to take a bite, even you Mr and Ms Banker.
When do we become cannibals? That part’s gonna be pretty awesome.
ManchuCandidate: “Reclaimed” Copper Pipes are also a thriving industry in my Chicago hood.
Banks should fail. There should be new banks.
Off topic: “Iraqi shoe thrower: Bush’s ’soleless smile’ set me off”. CNN. Sorry, I switched the homonyms myself. It’s ’soulless’, but if there was any justice…
AngryBlakGuy: I believe she’s trying to protect the TruckNutz part of the state.
What about the panhandle, and Jacksonville? The North part of Florida is like the South part of Florida, but worse!
Keep in mind that Wells Fargo is perhaps the most solvent bank right now. They aren’t under the same pressure to avoid foreclosures. Their mortgage portfolio isn’t total crap.
A banker walks into the lobby of his building, holding in his cupped hands a large, moist, steaming, reeking pile of dog shit labelled “unfair lending practices”. He exclaims to the whole office, “Will you look at what I almost stepped in??!!”
Wells Fargo is just getting over acquiring Wachovia. They’re probably in the shitter on the loans they have. Are any of the banks still solvent or do we need a Bank Holiday?
At the height of the real estate boom/mortgage refinancing craze I nearly refinanced my home under conditions that would have saved me little if any money, and could well have cost me more. It was only after I started looking closely at the numbers that I realized my near mistake. The mortgage broker sure as fuck wasn’t going to let me in on the little secret that he was about to sell me a crap deal. ‘course I had a feeling something was up when the guy kept trying to get me to fax him legal documents authorizing the mortgage transfer before I’d even met the guy in person. In the end I refinanced with my same lender and got a much better deal out of it (finished the basement in the process).
I bet Wells Fargo is going to say that it’s still trying to make up revenue lost in all those stage coach robberies back in the 19th century.
Curse my lack of forsight in not buying a house I couldn’t afford when they were handing out loans like beads at a Mardi Gras parade. If only I’d known that eventually the gubment would come along and save my greedy retarded ass so that I could remain in my white flight suburban McMansion. Oh, well, I’ll just make up for it by taking out MASSIVE amounts of student loans which I will never be able to repay. We are all Welfare Queens. Hooray!
I am shocked that the Obama administration has not thrown aside the Bush plan of creating a “Bad Bank” to soak up the overvalued paper, and instead instituted a “Good Bank” policy, where they refinance loans directly, letting the banks that don’t have enough capital fall where they may. I think it would set a better precedent for future banking, but what do I know — I’m only the PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSE. How’s that for a title?
Nate Silver docments National Tragedy!
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/02/breaking-beer-no-longer-recession-proof.html
Serolf Divad: “It was only after I started looking closely at the numbers that I realized my near mistake.”
You’re just not making any sense.
The housing mess kind of bugs me. If you choose to live in an area where a 2-bedroom house on a postage stamp lot is $500,000 and you can’t afford it, you either need to choose a smaller dwelling or live someplace else.
It’s pretty damn cheap to move to the midwest, and if you spent $500,000 here you’d get a 4-bedroom 2-story brick house…. with 200 acres of land.
Cities are overrated. We gots broadband in the stix now, come cowtipping with us!
Without AngryBlakGuy and his comrades Florida would not be blue for Hopey. While the real American part of Florida actually performed better for Hopey than for Kerry, Gore, or even Clinton re-elect, we are still basically South Georgia here.
I take offense to all this bashing of Florida. Take south Florida. Let someone else claim that which feels like Satan’s Asshole. If you could cut straight across the Panhandle, keeping Jacksonville, I think we’d be set. The U is already floating off into nothingness. Let’s speed it up.
daisy chain:
Oh, don’t get me started on the self-absorbed white flight assholes and their paved consumers’ “paradise”. If there truly is a root cause, that’s it. Wives that want to live like movie stars and husbands that want to be golf pros. All to make their neighbors and relatives jealous. My only consolation is that it will become history.
Sussemilch: You speak the truth. Plus, I can shoot things in my yard. (fucking ground squirrels)
Banks that engaged in risky loan practices, e.g. giving loans to people who had no business getting loans, are nothing more than monetized loan sharks and they expect payment no matter what.
Why? Because they think, like a good shylock does, that you are a scumbag for having to come to them anyway and a fool for believing that they are reasonable people who can be negotiated with.
“Hey numbnuts, if you weren’t such a f’ing scumbag in the first place you wouldn’t need to come to ME for money. You’re going to f’ing pay or we are going to break your balls. Got it?”
Secondly, the mortgage brokers already MADE their money off of fees for closing the loans. Its the schmuck banks and investment firms that bought the loans without doing their homework that have taken it on the chin. And, because they were suckered into buying these loans they are loathe to let them go to shit without extracting their pound of flesh.
They use threats of foreclosure like thugs use brass knuckles. They rarely actually foreclose if a person will continue to pay something. And, the way the system is set up is that they DEMAND a certain payment at a certain amount of the take nothing at all. This way they determine you ability to still cough up money. If you cannot cough anything up…then you get the brass knuckles.
Oh…and of course THEY lobbied to change the personal bankruptcy laws so you couldn’t just walk away. Hey, Pauly Walnuts has to be able to “visit” you until you pay your debt back…with the juice…or course.
The dirty secret is that people should just walk away in mass. The reality is that in order to get back on track and to make money, banks will have to loan to someone and if EVERYONE has bad credit, well that means it is going to have to be adjusted, in mass, to get us back to where we can loan money.
It’s only fear of losing all the important things like, you know, your TV, your pinstriped couch, your leased mini-van, your X-box guitar hero play set, and your hand-painted dish set from the hard working people of…where ever…that keeps people locked in this game. If your possessions define you, you have to play the game that provides you with your possessions.
If all you care about is feeding your family, providing shelter and having some clothes on your back…walking away is easy. But, as Sidartha said, craving and clinging are the root of all suffering.
Also.
@ Sussemilch: Except people stuck to more densely-populated areas because they were able to find more employment there, and figured they may as well pay extra, because they had a better-paying job, and prices were all out of perspective…
(and, having lived in both locales, I’d maybe rather live in a cardboard box in New Jersey than in the Midwest.)
Sussemilch: I understand your points, but where will I find an indie coffee shoppe?
SeminoleInDior: Except that I can’t help notice that southern hospitality generally stops at the border. Maybe due to the influx of disgruntled yankees, and that it’s almost impossible to be polite when you have sweat running down your ass crack at 7:00 in the morning.
That’s a lot of words. Just tell me whose fault it is. Preferably while shouting over someone else.
FIX
IT
AngryBlakGuy: plus, all teh gayz live in Key West, and we’ll need them to decorate our hobo shacks in the new millennium…
Lemming Caution: There is no more employment in urban areas than in rural ones. The employment base is configured differently however. In the city you need to have seven degrees to get a six-figure salary to spend 80% of your income on a crawl space above a whorehouse, in the country you get to know Fred and he pays you to drive a truck and pays you joke money, but it’s enough to pay for a 2-story mansion on a plantation and all the beer you can guzzle (with 2 weeks off for deer hunting season).
JadedDIssonance: All coffee shops in the country are independent brewers. Typically there’s one per town, and it stays under “the man’s” radar by closing every 18 months and reopening under a new name.
AfghanVet: You, my friend, have nailed it.
Come here a minute: you’ve been watching too much SNL.
AfghanVet: don’t you DARE insult my 52 inch HDTV.
AfghanVet: I have wondered why more people don’t just walk away. Really, this is pretty much what happened to the credit card industry. They got their way for a few years and jacked up interest rates and penalties and fees, and after a couple of years of that regular folks just couldn’t make the monthly minimums anymore and said “fuk it!”. 500 calls a day from the collections unit threatening to ruin your credit rating doesn’t change anything; “Hey, my credit sucked anyway and I still don’t have 500 bucks to send you this month on account of I gotta buy groceries. Get a real job you collections nazi!”(click)
AfghanVet: Siddartha may have made a lot of glib wisecracks about the meaning of life, but I’ll bet if he had a Wii, even though it might take him a long time to get the hang of it, but the obvious health benefits would become clear over time. So, sorry, but Siddartha’s just not “all that.”
Ah, the US bank industry. Doing everything it can to make the US auto industry look like the corporate equivalent of Sun Tzu.
AfghanVet:
Perfect analogy. I nice blend of Bugs Bunny and Goodfellas mobsters kicked up with Rounders’ Grama.
Sussemilch: But I’d rather have degrees and something to do on the weekend. Besides shooting animals, of course.
AfghanVet: Sometimes I love you.
Toonces: You can have your bread and circuses, I’ll take my venison and a beautiful sunset.
pondscum: You speak the truth. Plus, I can shoot things in my yard. (fucking ground squirrels)
Ditto here, in my woodsy enclave (fucking elk.)
Toonces: You just have to pick your “country” with care. We happen to be near a large Big Ten university with all the sports, culture and coffee shops you could want only a 25 minute drive from the house out in the middle of BFE.
Lascauxcaveman: ohmygodIloveelk. TASTY!
How I love wells fargo, those reluctant TARP fund whores! From http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/24/BUMI15FFNL.DTL :
“Wells Fargo said it will use the funds “to make more loans to creditworthy customers and to find solutions for our mortgage customers late on their payments or facing foreclosure so they can stay in their homes.”"
So, aaparently they’re using the TARP funds to make more money in fees. Yay TARP!
Sussemilch: I thought people in ‘teh rurals’ were all on benefits: either farm subsidies or straight-up dole, and that they the only reason they live there is to keep their sexual deviances hidden from bloggers (cult-zombie-vegetable sex stuff*). Have I been misinformed by the televisions?
* This is the title of Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, due out in June.
AfghanVet: win, win, win.
AfghanVet:
Truer words ever posted.
Even the mob knew/cared enough to put money back into the communities they, um, serviced.
There’s a difference between the mob and banks? I thought if you didn’t want blood money, you went to a credit union. Here’s a lovely etiquette guide for those upstanding banker types to get them through the year:
http://tinyurl.com/buxtx6
@AfghanVet: Because people responded positively to your comment, I assume it must be insightful or witty. I almost went back and read it, the longest comment I’ve ever seen on Wonkette. But then oooh shiny…
Sussemilch: I almost forgot that we don’t have sunsets here in the cities. Man, this place sucks.
Hell, in upper Michigan, you can get a four-bedroom house, 200 acres and 500 feet on the bass lake four miles from the golf course for $500,000 grand, and all the house help you want for $5.00/hr. Yep, I’m that available…
Retooling banks wouldn’t work. They’re already run by the best tools we could find.
DE-tooling the banks might be helpful, though.
So, Wells Fargo came to us and offered to roll our two mortgages into one at a much lower interest rate. Sure, we said. Then they determined we owe more on our house than it’s worth, so Wells Fargo decided they’d rather not lower our interest rates at all. The end.
NotNotLickingToads: Actually, this little bit of awesome just hit me:
If the majority of people wanted to live in the country, the country would be the city.
Whoah…also, did you ever think about how “dog” read backwards spells “god”?????????
Loan modification is bullshit! I did a loan mod and my payments wound up being $256.41 more a month than the original amount that I could not pay to begin with! And my shizz is with Ocwen - so fuck them! Also.
re=247115]ToeCramps[/re]: I can’t help but wonder, did you actually read the documents — or at least, the bottom line — before you signed them?
If you’ve got any spare cash, I have some great waterfront property in Arizona that you might be interested in.
AngryBlakGuy: Well, that’s how things work. The good of the many must take priority. Sorry, dude. I have a couch (for now), so if you need a place in the actual states, let me know….
NotNotLickingToads: When the sun sets behind Kinko’s or OfficeMax it’s just not as romantic, and if you have to drive somewhere to see the sun then you’re missing the point.
Nice starry sky, btw.
Is that photo at the top supposed to be what every house in the US is going to look like in the future, or just the White House?
Mr. Cold and I were contacted by our bank last month about a re-fi. Mr. Cold met with the banker, who offered us a full point lower on our current interest rates and would roll closing costs into the loan. Sounded great, so we said yes. Then Bank Dude fucked around for a month, saying he was ’so busy’ with all of these re-fi applications that had come flooding in.
This week, the story has changed - we have to front up a few grand if we still want the loan, plus he offered us a HELOC, which we never asked for and Do.Not.Want. We’ve decided to tell him to get fucked and try again in April, preferably with a different bank.
This bank lost $2.2 billion last year. It would be a shame if they failed, but our current mortgage is pretty reasonable, and it’s the only account we have there. They also laid off one of our good friends who worked there, probably because he is jittery and gay, and gay people are not liked very much around these parts.
Actually, now that I think about it, I wish they would go under.
But South Florida is the only non-redneck part of the state! Saving the west coast is also way too kind. We should just saw off the entire state, but allow all of South Florida east of Lake Okeechobee and south of Port St. Lucie, plus Orlando (because theme parks rock), to be the newest Hawaiian islands.
Sussemilch: Oooh…you sure know how to make a person feel inferior on the basis of geographic location! Now come on…tell me how dirty my air is and how naughty my crime rate is…
NotNotLickingToads: Hey if you love your city, awesome. Rock on. Whatever. I was just talking about you what you can get for the same amount of money someplace else. And yes, your air quality sucks, but it doesn’t make you less of a person for choosing to breathe it. Sure, the crime can be oppressive and give rise to barred windows and gated communities, but there’s nothing wrong with focusing on safety and security. Sure, the apartment walls are thin enough that you can smell what people are eating for breakfast, but there’s always the reassuring feeling that you’re never completely alone.
brb, taking a piss off the front porch, shooting a bear, and brushing my tooth
CAN WE SEND WELLS FARGO EXECS A COPY OF THIS POST, PLZ?
Ha! I called my bank to refi my mortgage, and they wanted 5K upfront to drop my monthly payments from $2238 to $2187. I just assumed that my lack of understanding of the matter resulted from my having a vagina, which is not so good at the maths.
Exhibit B reminds me of the last time I got a car policy from the local insurance dive. She went though a bunch of stuff, “$22 for this, $43 for this, $13 for this (ed: some “fee” that had no literal translatable meaning)” So I stopped her and asked if I needed it and if it made any difference to my policy. She said no. I said, so leave it off. She said OK. I saved $13. She was weirdly unembarrassed. MOre like tired and jaded and totally unable to defend the indefesible fragging they practice rountinely. Sort of like that Monty Python skit (”Oh you’ve go the NO PAY POLICY!!” “Oh, you’ve the the SAME MONTLY PAYMENT restructuring!!”)