I have to say it

I think it's time I gave you my opinion on this whole "mortgage crisis" business. I can't hold back anymore.

For pretty much most of my escrow career I have had a very lender-heavy desk. This means most of my clients were mortgage brokers and mortgage bankers (there's a difference) handling refinances for the entire range of homeowners. You had the customer who was doing some remodeling and using their equity for that, you had the customer doing a "rate-and-term" - generally refinancing to lower their interest rate and payment, you had the customer trying to remove a spouse after divorce, and you had the customer using the equity in their home to pay off consumer debt. I made a huge living off of this lender business, and a lot of escrow purists who preferred doing primarily resale business turned up their noses at me because of it. But I loved it. Lender business was somewhat less involved (in a lot of cases) than resale, and I could close 60-80 files a month compared to a resale desk that closed perhaps 40 in the best of times. Plus, I'm really good at what I do, and care about closing as much as a I can in a month, which results in the clients getting paid. All good.

A big chunk of that business is what we call "foreclosure bust out" or "bankruptcy bust out". These would be loans that, for a higher rate and higher loan fees, would pull a homeowner out of foreclosure or bankruptcy, pay some debt perhaps, and get them back in a position to correct their delinquencies and move forward. Most of the time the new loan would be a two- or three- year fixed rate that turned into an adjustable - but if you kept your payments current during the fixed period you would qualify for a more conventional loan afterward. Conventional meaning the lower fixed rate. The key to all this was following the plan. Pay your bills, control your debt, be grateful you get to keep your house.

I'm not going to say that all of my lender clients were angelic. They made plenty of money doing this sort of work. But the plan WORKED if the homeowner followed the rules. The problem? The homeowners didn't necessarily follow the rules.

For whatever dang reason in this society, we see something pretty and shiney - a neato new car or a big screen TV the size of a banquet table - and we simply must have it (I say "we" because I am a part of this society whether I like it or not. I'm trying not to alienate anyone...). Even if we don't have any money, we think, hey! I'll just charge it! Then I can have all this neato stuff and my credit card payment will only be like $30 a month! Well, kids, it isn't like that anymore. And I cannot begin to tell you the pages and pages of debt I see on your final application at closing. What were you thinking? Seriously I commonly see over $70,000 in consumer debt (credit cards mostly) owed by a homeowner who also had two mortgages and made less than $5000 a month. Good luck with that. One could say, Shame on the credit card companies! But not me. We humans are blessed with that one thing that sets us apart from the rest of the animals - free will. Only YOU know if you can afford something or not.

Which brings me to my bitch. I am sick to death of hearing about the mortgage crisis and what the government is going to do about it. Foreclosures are up right now, and why? Because people are buying houses they cannot afford. If you really could afford it, you wouldn't have had to put zero down and squeeze yourself in with a two-year-fixed rate loan with a three year prepayment penalty and now your rate is twice as high. IF YOU HAD READ WHAT YOU SIGNED, you would have KNOWN that the payment had the potential to jump in two or three years, or five, or seven. So who are you blaming? And why can't you refi into a conventional loan now? What's that? Because your credit is shot after furnishing the too-much-house to look like something on "Cribs"? And you certainly aren't paying your Wickes bill because look what happened to them? And this is WHOSE fault? The lender? The loan officer? THE GOVERNMENT?? No. It is not. It is yours. Because nobody held a flipping GUN to your head and told you to buy a brand new home that was way too much for you and your $2500-a-month-two-kids-stay-at-home-wife ASS to afford. YOU HAD TO HAVE IT, along with your BIG SCREEN TV and WII and all that CRAP and now it is up to the government to bail your sorry ass out. Because when you GOT this loan, you had the LOAN OFFICER explain it to you, you had the ESCROW CLOSER explain it to you, and you had the PAPERS RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU before you signed them.

TAKE. RESPONSIBILITY. Where I come from, your signature says you agreed to it. If you don't understand it, don't sign it.

The good news about all this is I don't have the readership to spark a huge debate or offend a bunch of people, but I will again say that THIS IS MY BLOG and I will SAY WHAT I WANT. Trust me, if anyone WERE to argue this, you will not win with me. But I would love for you to try.