SHARE THIS SHOW:
RELATED CONVERSATIONS:
RECENTLY ON TOL:
TOL Our Town
- A tumblr site dedicated to the people and places that make up Oregon and Southwest Washington.
TAGS:
Drive down any residential street these days and it is likely you'll see at least a For Sale sign or two. You might even catch sight of an ominous Foreclosure notice. For some people this signals the possibility of a great deal. For others it evokes fear, as the economy continues to suffer. Could your home be next?
On July 30th, Governor Kulongoski signed a bill aiming to prevent unnecessary home foreclosures in Oregon. The legislation makes new requirements of lenders: they must make a “good faith effort” to consider modifying the borrower’s loan; and they must notify borrowers whose homes might be foreclosed upon that they have a right to meet with the lender.
The legislation passed following a significant spike in home foreclosures across Oregon in the first half of 2009. Oregon now ranks eleventh in the nation for foreclosures. There have been 19,503 foreclosure-related actions in the last six months. Portland, Salem and Eugene all had at least double the number of foreclosures compared to the first half of 2008. It’s speculated that this rise in foreclosure activity might have more to do with unemployment than subprime mortgages.
Have you been foreclosed upon, or are you facing the possibility of foreclosure? If so, what circumstances led to that, and how could it have been prevented? Have you worked with a lender to renegotiate your loan? How is the high rate of foreclosures statewide affecting you? Did you share your thoughts on our foreclosure show six months ago? How have things changed for you since then?
GUESTS:
- Tom Heinicke: Real estate agent in Portland
- D'Arcy Usher Martin: Real estate agent in Eugene
- Ed Delgado: Senior vice president at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage
Tagged as: foreclosure · housing · real estate
Photo credit: Hackshaven / Creative Commons
-
Secondly, and directly regarding SB628.....It is a travesty and a joke, a waste of taxpayers money. I was invited to testify by Senator Johnson, as being the best qualified person she knew who could provide personal insight into the foreclosure issue. Senator Bonamici, and her committee had my testimony in advance and knew what I was going to say. It was a packed house that day, and they gave Our Oregon and a couple of other so-called consumer protection agencies as much time as they wanted to exbound their bs onto the committee.
I was to have 5 minutes, and I was cut-off after about 30 seconds, and asked if had solutions to discuss. I gave them 2 very good items, the first which could have saved the state alot of money with their kangaroo proceedings.
NACA.COM..... These people are devoted to the stopping of predatory lending and the assistance of those facing foreclosure. They are a government funded nonrprofit who have diligently pursued the servicers and lenders of subprime mortgages, and have built agreements with them to modify loans that work, and do not fail after a couple of months, as so many do.
Oregon will have over 20,000 foreclosures this year, if I am not mistaken, The state of Florida will have over 400,000, a hugely stark difference. NACA (Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America), in addition to their offices which currently are in over 23 states also has weekend bus tours. They will go into an area and in one weekend will have modified 10,000 mortgages........Apparantly Bonamici and her gang, do not how to add to well. That is 2 weeks to solve Oregons foreclosure problem.
The thing is with NACA, in order to set up offices in any state, they must first be invited by the legislature of that given state........Again, Bonamici and her gang would rather waste taxpayers money and nonprofit money to Our Oregon to come up with this ludicrous legislation..
ANYONE IN FORECLOSURE DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME WITH THIS LEGISLATION.....PLEASE CONTACT NACA.COM ...THEY WILL ASSIST YOU EVEN THOUGH THEY DO NOT HAVE AN OFFICE HERE.
-
Thirdly, how is it that legislation, on such a serious issue, can be passed without even looking to what is going on in other states. This legislation they passed is so ridiculously inept, its frankly ludicrous.
In 2005 a judge in Cleveland, Ohio threw out 14 cases of foreclosure based on standing, saying that MER's (mortgage electronic Registration) does not have the right to foreclose because they never had in their possession ownership of the note. It was upheld a couple of years later by the Ohio Supreme Court.
MER,s has been thrown out of many court rooms from Florida to Nevada. Laughed out of court from Michigan to New York......New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and a couple also from Washington State.
Drop me a line at kwddesigninc@centurytel.net or call me at 503-543-3642 and I will glad to share the hundreds of lawsuits I have on file...............
My intention is to file a complaint with the governors office to investigate Our Oregon's nonprofit status because I do not all feel that they served to protect the consumers in this case........They wasted taxpayers money and they have their heads so far up the rearends of the legislature that all others are ignored....
-
Does anyone remember any public demand for someone to create Derivatives?
No.
Subprime mortgages?
No.
Any other financial schemes and scams?
No.
Any consumer demand for a devastating economic crash into a Re-Depression?
No.
There is a very old slogan in the Insurance Industry:
Insurance is not "bought", it is sold!
All of of these Derivative based Subprime Mortgages were sold!
Senator Lindsey Graham and his fellow Conservative Republicans pushed through a 1999 Law that outlawed any Regulation or Oversight of Derivative based financial schemes and the result is that subprime mortgages were "sold" to consumers who had no ability to access any knowledge at all about what they were being "sold".
And now our US and most of the world economy has crashed into a Re-Depression unseen since the 1930s Great Depression.
Folks, we need Regulations and Oversight about some things in our economy in order to prevent the kind of problems that we have now, we need to Regulate and Enforce Laws about Financial Dealings!
Lawless Conservatism is way out of date!
-
Right on Tom!
If anyone still doesn't understand how the financial dealings worked, read this highly informative (and maddening) article in Rolling Stone about AIG: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/print
-
It seems the responsibility or the risk is with the organization who supplies the loan. People who lie give false information should be prosecuted, but there is nothing wrong with applying for a loan you may not qualify for, it is the lender who should say, sorry you do not qualify based on our standards! The lender should not be able to raise the rate more than a given amount so as to raise the monthly payment over a given amount i a given amount of time. Yes it would be nice if borrowers were honest about what they can afford, and if they understood the consequences of the 50 pieces of paper they sign when they buy a house, but it should be spelled out and demanded by the purchaser that my payment will not exceed a given amount and spelled out over the term of the loan. Why can people not pay a lesser amount and say rent their home, put their loan on pause until it can be renegotiated, thus extending the loan seems like a win win. lender gets more $ over the life of the loan and the "owner" gets to remain in home???
-
The first item that we need to understand are these are not prime loans in no way, shape or form....There are no similarities, none whatsoever. The absolute truth of the matter is that these are legalized methods of keeping people down, and if they are already not down, a means by which to get them down.....Why? .....an endless life of debt enslavement...
The saddest thing about it is that our elected officials made all this possible, both Republican and Democrat. There is no room here for partisanship, because they both have a share in it. Do you know that between the years 1998-2008, +$1.7 billion dollars went to national campaign contributions, and another $3.7 billion went to the lobbying interests, that is over $5 billion dollars spent by the financial sector (finance, insurance and real estate) that went into the hands of Congress essentially.
Congress can do anything it wants, supposed to be the will of the people. They could have easily marched their butts into session and voted to change what deregulatory actions they enacted, to reverse them or something.........WHY DID THEY NOT??? Those are the questions we need to start asking.
-
There is an IRS form that lenders required aggregators or originators to have signed and filled out by the borrowers known as a 4506T. This is a form that gives permission to the IRS to disclose to the broker, originator and lender a borrowers previous years taxable income.
In affect a means of income verification. These were even required by lenders on the so called liar-loans and ninja loans. Who in their right mind is going to lie on loan docs and sign a 4506T, which is very clear in its meaning as opposed to the loan docs themselves.
NOBODY....unless of course the form is never given the borrower and forged by the broker.....There is a mountain of evidence that is piling up against the brokers, funny how well they manage to stay insulated.......In times when even finanicial sector lobbying is down, the only group that has substantially increased their efforts are the mortgage bankers assn........
-
I challenge anyone to produce a mortgage backed security that has any loans that are forecasted to go beyond 5 years, 10 at most..These were designed for that, they were designed for the quick profits they were to yield....
There are very distinct differences between the disclosure on an mbs in comparison to the loan docs that subprime borrowers were given. The prospectus for an mbs is about 500 pages and another couple of hundred for the Pooling and Servicing Agreements. When i first opened up the mbs that my loan belongs to I could not make heads or tails out of it. But I spent months educating myself and asking questions to learn about them, and what they are essentially is a plan that lays out the means by which to bleed the equity out and drop the homeowners off on the side of the road. All the traps that are absent from the loans docs that the borrowers sign are all spelled out in the Pooling and Service Agreements......it is actually quite disgusting.
As far as the loan docs. people have the opinion that the borrowers are stupid, unintelligent idiots....Well there have been studies done where prime borrowers fared no better at understanding them. Hell, Alan Greenspan admitted in an interview that he could not make heads or tails out them....
-
In a nutshell, we have been duped, ladies and gentleman. I can tell you from months of investigations that we are not being given the full story, far, far from it.
I have no doubt in my mind had the truth been told from the outset, the political will would have gone in the favor of stopping foreclosures, and this economic crisis, recession, depression, whatever you want to call it would have not been as deep as it has become.
We have allowed the banks to get stronger and more powerful than ever before. We gave them hundreds of billions and they bought up other banks that were going under, and they have horded money, in effect controlling the whole economy. They did not at all do what they were supposed to do, and it all began with the grand illusion that they passed as subprime.......
For those that could care less and/or are still unmoved by thosethat have lost their homes, not worry their lives are completely over, their credit destroyed beyond repair.
Credit card interest rates have been raised on nearly everyone, and for those that are struggling to make ends meet now can not afford the new payments. This means missed payments and possible default, which damages credit scores.
Others have had their credit limits lowered, which has been proven damages credit scores. For the individual this has great affects. For thousands of small businesses there credit limit or line of credit is the live blood that keeps them in business. Record numbers of businesses are going under, which , you got it damages credit scores......
As the ultimate kick in the teeth, the banks have raised the prime lending point score from 680, to 720 and recently to 760. According to a recent Transunion report the average score in the US is 651........
Is anyone getting this, the banks are enslaving us with higher interest rates..........This has to stop and the place to start is with foreclosures....Forget the defecit people, we will not be able to ever come close to paying it because all our money is going not to productivity or GDP but into the hands of banks......
So all you prime people out there wake up they are coming to get you to
-
I recently “dodged the bullet” of a threatened foreclosure by selling my condo.
I’ve been unemployed since January, but fell behind on my mortgage only in June. Yet my lender escalated quickly from a late fee to warning letters to default notice to threat of foreclosure in less than 3 months!
I was negotiating with my buyer when I fell behind so I didn’t try to get my loan modified. But I suspect that process would have been too slow to save me; since my lender (Wells Fargo) is said to have modified on 6% of their troubled loans, while foreclosing on the rest.
-
What do you all make of Tom Heinicke's surprising (dismaying?) admission just now: that the recession is a dramatic event, but it won't necessarily change our behavior. We STILL may get in over our heads.
Do you agree?
-
I think there are a number of people who think that the real estate market will just "bounce back" to gaining 15%/per year any time now. As if the boom years were not an aberration, but were normal. I suspect that some of those folks will end up being in over their heads - at least as much as the banks will let them.
-
I think that Americans are always looking for the easy way - "something for nothing." Thus, if you tell someone that they can pay almost zero money down, they'll take it as it satisfies immediate desires. Not everyone plans ahead. Those of us that do already had a positive savings rate before the recession. Perhaps a few will have learned their lesson through this experience, but I don't think it applies across the board.
-
Yes, people are greedy creatures! They suck everything up given the chance. Sure the banks are deplorable and they have the economies of scale to create the most harm. But, individuals poor and rich, big and small are just as bad. We talk about this divide like we talk about the corporation versus the human, as if we are talking about good and evil, but guess what: those corporations are made by people just like us. This concept is similar to supporting small businesses. Because we somehow think small business is inherently good---but most small businesses have the aspirations to become big businesses---and given the chance they will take it.
Everyone is trying to climb the ladder---the homeowner is also trying to get bigger by buying the home, the bank is trying to get bigger by holding the mortgage. It is a vicious never-ending cycle, you can't stop it, but I suppose you can at least put the regulations in place that help it to be a bit more equitable. I think it is important to remember that we are all guilty---and we should not separate this issue into an ethereal two sides, of "us" versus an "illusive" them. The line between "us" and "them" is very thin and it is easy to cross over.
-
I commend Emily and the TOL staff for raising this issue again for discussion
The people such as myself who have lived and suffered through this are the best to offer discussion because we have all the information. I called in a year ago so I am not sure they would take my call again. I have learned much, such as, a person who designs and builds his own home for his family, maintains it for 20 years, thousands on landscaping self-installed; what the banks did by criminally taking my home away while I approached retirement was wrong. There are stories just making it to the news now that point to this as wrongful. The resolve for this condition has no quick fixes, not even the president's plan unfortunately. It took hiring an attorney to regain my lost equity. This was yet another unforeseen and very costly and painful process but the money regained does not replace the lost home. 20 years of growing and maintaining special landscaping cannot be redone now.
The banks greed and the system running unregulated has destroyed many people lives by taking their homes away, especially after 20 years, this should not have happened.
Mark Seibold, Retired Artist-Astronomer Portland Oregon
-
Wells Fargo.....please
-
Either the rep from Wells Fargo doesn't have a clue about the real world or the branch in Salem didn't get the memo that they are actually nice people. This bank backed us into a corner on a second mortgage, pulled a bait-and-switch on us with the new note, raised our rates beyond our ability to pay, wouldn't talk to us about rewriting the loan until the house was one month from the auction block, and then sent us a letter raising our payment to over $3,000.
Two days ago we left our home in Salem and moved back to Lake Oswego to live in a condo. If I met your guest on the street today the nicest thing I would do is spit in his face.
-
I just got off the phone with Bank of America about our pending foreclosure. I learned we are now actually in "early foreclosure" but they don't tell you that unless you ask, no notifications sent. How did we get here? Simple. My husband and I both had decent jobs, a combined net income of about $5000/month. That all changed shortly after we bought a restaurant in early 2008, right before the economy took a huge dive. My husband thought he would be able to keep his job with proper management in place at the restaurant, in hindsight that was unrealistic. He had to quit his job in August 2008, and our net income went down to about $3200/month, my salary only. Our mortgage payments are $1800/month. We had difficulty paying this and all of our other expenses. We now had an equity loan on our house to pay monthly on top of our household expenses and mortgage payments. Furthermore, we had to supplement the restaurant with our own personal reserve for the first year. When they say that restaurants aren't profitable for 2 years on average, this is true! Then...to make matter worse, my salary which is partly based on commission sales in the luxury kitchen & bath market was affected by a slow economy and my net income dropped to $1845/mo beginning May 09.
We love our home, we have put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into it. We would like to keep it. However, Bank of America said we do not qualify for assitance. Why? because our loan is a fixed rate. Apparently if you have a fixed rate, the only modification they can do for you is to give you a repayment plan for the amount delinquent. This would be added on to our current monthly mortgage payment. What we really need is to restructure the loan, or refinance or something that would lower our payments for a year. Why isn't this possible? With the $500 -$600 monthly that my husband can bring home in tips paired with about $1000 I can contribute, we could make monthly mortgage payments of around $1200.
We are not slipping through the cracks because we aren't contacting the bank. We can make a monthly payment. It is disheartening to have an all or nothing situation with no option for a loan modification that would lower our payments. If anyone has any suggestions please let me know. Are we missing something, is there an option that we are unaware of? I heard the vice president of Wells Fargo say that banks really want to help people to stay in their homes, really? I am not sure I agree.
-
The threat in the economy continues to exist. Foreclosure and bankruptcy was still on the rise actually we used to hear these cases but I think the challenge among the financial institution or any business establishments are to adapt some measure to control such kind of trouble. I know that there are some things that beyond our control but at least they should do something to minimize the frequent occurrence. Regulatory body should have to intervene in this issue to stabilize the ailing financial system. Anyway did you know that not all New Years Eve parties are going to be as grand as the attendees would like – because everyone just blew all their cash on buying presents for the various numbskulls that they commiserate with. Find theme parties you can throw that double as potlucks, say everyone brings a dish common from a particular era or country, or have everyone split the check – and have a great New Years party without needing a lot of cash now.
-
Comments are now closed.
I am truly upset about SB628 because it does not address any of core issues whatsoever. The core issue is the stigma that surrounds foreclosure that the mainstream media pumped into public mindset. Mainly, that people took mortgages that they could not possibly afford, that they lied on applications inasmuch as their income levels and even employment.Obviously, that does not generate any political will to assist people, given that story. It is true though, but only to a small mass of the 7 million people that were sold subprimes. SOMEHOW THE REST OF TRUTH JUST NEVER MADE IT OUT......
Does it make a difference to anyone if over 70% of subprimes written were to people who qualified for prime conventional mortgages. Does it matter that they were steered by unscrupulous brokers into subprime, and that millions of dollars are flying around Washington to keep this under wraps. This is straight from the mouth of a legislative aide to Senator Merkley, who if you do not know, sits on the housing, Banking and Urban Affairs Committee....
It damn well should matter, because the people who have been foreclosed on are shown little empathy, when in fact they should be given carte blanche treatment for being setup and sent to hell, which is exactly what these mortgages are. The Brokers, they need to be investigated and held responsible for the damage that they have caused people's lives.....They have destroyed good families, not to mention the economy as well.
I have devoted thousands of hours to study on this issue, and I have dozens upon dozens of university legal and economic research studies as well as thinktank studies that provide details that mainstream media simply does not report, and I will be more than happy to share those reports with anyone interested
drop me a line at kwddesigninc@centurytel.net