Fark yeah!

Yeah and "eat shiat" too for the folks stupid enough to own a home near one of those flippages without any dolphin action of their own.

So if I overextend myself in the initial mortgage I win. If I took a conservative mortgage and overextended myself later I lose.

ZAZ: So if I overextend myself in the initial mortgage I win. If I took a conservative mortgage and overextended myself later I lose.

Did you read the article? That's not the case. Only if you bought a McMansion on a Wal-Mart salary, and then sucked up all the equity, would that be true.

"The plan I'm announcing focuses on rescuing families who have played by the rules and acted responsibly,"

Those people don't need to be rescued.

Hang on, I'm jotting this down...

Do not invest in the U.S. housing market

...alright, back to rescuing the economy.

I read the article and a longer Q and A posted later and it still looks to me like similarly situated people are treated differently. Underwater, one mortgage, you win. Underwater, two mortgages, you lose.

ZAZ: I read the article and a longer Q and A posted later and it still looks to me like similarly situated people are treated differently. Underwater, one mortgage, you win. Underwater, two mortgages, you lose.

I wasn't clear on that. I kind of thought that Underwater, two mortgages, you could refi the first one, but not the second.

ZAZ: So if I overextend myself in the initial mortgage I win. If I took a conservative mortgage and overextended myself later I lose.

Say what you will about the tenants of Socialism, at least it's an ethos.

EatHam: ZAZ: I read the article and a longer Q and A posted later and it still looks to me like similarly situated people are treated differently. Underwater, one mortgage, you win. Underwater, two mortgages, you lose.

I wasn't clear on that. I kind of thought that Underwater, two mortgages, you could refi the first one, but not the second.

Either way it is a good measure. I am glad that Obama came into office and inside of a month took more action than Bush did during this entire ordeal.

EatHam: "The plan I'm announcing focuses on rescuing families who have played by the rules and acted responsibly,"

Those people don't need to be rescued.

Exactly.

How can you tell whether a homeowner played by the rules?
They can afford their mortgage payment.

/I suppose I wouldn't mind if assistance went to people who had adequate income at the inception of the mortgage but have lost their jobs in the recession. Maybe.

EatHam: "The plan I'm announcing focuses on rescuing families who have played by the rules and acted responsibly,"

Those people don't need to be rescued.

Some do, especially with the recession and people losing jobs. In the past if a member of a household lost a job for an extended period they could try to refinance the house to a lower monthly rate until the monthly income could be restored.

Now, that is almost impossible to do, and there are millions of families struggling to stay in a house that they could afford before the recession started.

what about our swiss bank tax cut folks!!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29268064/

I love how the conservative response to this is the typical "poor people should suck it" that you'd expect from them.

That said, I'll believe it when I see it.

Debeo Summa Credo: How can you tell whether a homeowner played by the rules?
They can afford their mortgage payment.

By that logic, you could also say that crime victims don't need any protection because they failed to protect themselves in the first place.

If you want to stand for the proposition that we're all on our own, bub, then be consistent about it, and allow society to devolve into a survival of the fittest.

allcaps:

"There are only bailouts for big businesses who put the kids of lobbyists though school. You little shrimps who thought you wanted a taste, screw you."

OK Mr. President. How does it accomplish this? I just graduated from school. If I had been stupid and bought a home that I couldn't possibly afford for under $500K, I would deserve to have a loan refinanced? I mean I understand assisting those that get laid off during hard times, but there are plenty of people who were gaming the system by buying a home (even their FIRST home) that they couldn't afford. And now we're going to re-negotiate their stupid decisions to the tune of $75 Billion. And you know who's going to pay for it? People who didn't buy a home. People who (heaven forbid) pay rent instead of a mortgage. Home owners who paid off their mortgages. People who didn't make really stupid decisions.

Maine-iac: What's wrong with flipping houses? I've re-habbed several junkers in the same neighborhood. The new owners love them. Now the neghborhood is nicer and the property values have gone up. Oh, and god forbid, I made a profit for my efforts.

I think the problem is that people took out loans for the expressed purpose of flipping houses. If you flip houses and you make a profit, more power to you. But if you flip houses and you take out a bunch of loans you can't afford, you shouldn't get government assistance.

Fark-the-Fnord: Either way it is a good measure. I am glad that Obama came into office and inside of a month took more action than Bush did during this entire ordeal.

Just taking action isn't always a good thing. You have to take the right action.

A better action would have been to come out and say it: people, stop being idiots and don't buy a home unless you can put 20% or so down. If your career is flipping burgers or mopping floors, you probably won't be able to do this. Enjoy your rental unit. I also think a better action would be for Obama to personally slap everyone who took some of these offers in the face.

Maine-iac: What's wrong with flipping houses? I've re-habbed several junkers in the same neighborhood. The new owners love them. Now the neghborhood is nicer and the property values have gone up. Oh, and god forbid, I made a profit for my efforts.

The problem is, you've made enough money. Obviously if you have enough to have internet service, you don't need anymore. Instead of flipping houses for your own personal gain, you should be concentrating your efforts on building Habitat for Humanity houses. Either that, or building tree houses for those who want to protect Mother Earth and her forests by stopping the loggers from coming in and cutting down trees to make more homes. Stop being such a greedy bastard. It's time for you to Share the Wealth™.

Maine-iac: What's wrong with flipping houses? I've re-habbed several junkers in the same neighborhood. The new owners love them. Now the neghborhood is nicer and the property values have gone up. Oh, and god forbid, I made a profit for my efforts.

I think the problem is trying to flip houses and failing at it.

Maine-iac: What's wrong with flipping houses? I've re-habbed several junkers in the same neighborhood. The new owners love them. Now the neghborhood is nicer and the property values have gone up. Oh, and god forbid, I made a profit for my efforts.

You also priced the home out of the range of someone who could have originally afforded it and used it to live in. You changed the makeup of the neighborhood and forced lower income people to buy somewhere else. You also probably increased the tax assessments of the exisiting home owners and probably forced people to lose their houses or refinance to outrageous rates to afford to continue to live there. But that certainly isn't part of how we got into this mess.

Doak: OK Mr. President. How does it accomplish this? I just graduated from school. If I had been stupid and bought a home that I couldn't possibly afford for under $500K, I would deserve to have a loan refinanced? I mean I understand assisting those that get laid off during hard times, but there are plenty of people who were gaming the system by buying a home (even their FIRST home) that they couldn't afford. And now we're going to re-negotiate their stupid decisions to the tune of $75 Billion. And you know who's going to pay for it? People who didn't buy a home. People who (heaven forbid) pay rent instead of a mortgage. Home owners who paid off their mortgages. People who didn't make really stupid decisions.

That would be such a completely valid statement if it were not the inverse of the entire point of the article.

Maine-iac: What's wrong with flipping houses? I've re-habbed several junkers in the same neighborhood. The new owners love them. Now the neghborhood is nicer and the property values have gone up. Oh, and god forbid, I made a profit for my efforts.

Great. You're doing it right. But the vast majority of people who flipped houses thought they could buy a house, throw a coat of paint on it, and sell it in a year for a 20% increase. That worked fine for a few years, but when the massively inflated housing prices started to normalize, these people were over their heads.

Buying a fixer upper and putting some serious elbow grease into it will almost always be a sound investment, but not if you buy 3 or 4 at a time and can't make the mortgage payments on them.

ZachF81: Fark-the-Fnord: Either way it is a good measure. I am glad that Obama came into office and inside of a month took more action than Bush did during this entire ordeal.

Just taking action isn't always a good thing. You have to take the right action.

A better action would have been to come out and say it: people, stop being idiots and don't buy a home unless you can put 20% or so down. If your career is flipping burgers or mopping floors, you probably won't be able to do this. Enjoy your rental unit. I also think a better action would be for Obama to personally slap everyone who took some of these offers in the face.

All sarcasm aside, I don't know a whole lot of people who can put 20% down on a home, even if it's a manageable price. 20% sounds like so little until you attach it to a number. $200k for a single family home is a pretty good bargain in some cities. What single families do you know that can drop $40,000 on a down payment? They'd have to save an extra $300 and change a month for ten years to be able to do that. Would it be smart? Sure. Realistic? Not so much. 5% down on a reasonably priced home with affordable and fixed mortgage payments is a good start - as long as they plan on living in it for a long time.

In soviet Obamatavia, house flips you.

Maine-iac: What's wrong with flipping houses? I've re-habbed several junkers in the same neighborhood. The new owners love them. Now the neghborhood is nicer and the property values have gone up. Oh, and god forbid, I made a profit for my efforts.

There's nothing wrong with it. I imagine it's kind of fun if you can make it work. But I guess the thinking is that house-flippers are voluntarily taking a big financial risk with discretionary income in hopes of making a big profit. Whereas ordinary homeowners aren't gambling for profit. They're taking a calculated risk involving their life's savings in order to achieve greater stability, etc.

Maine-iac: If you take out a mortgage to flip a house, you're doing it wrong.

ok, so what people were doing was buying a house that needed a little work and putting no money down, or something like 2-3% down. They'd keep it for 6mo to a year, and try and sell it at an inflated price- but they weren't rehabbing these places, they were cleaning them up, painting them and putting in nicer appliances.

The problem is, *I* can clean and paint a house. You don't need to be a contractor to do that/

Debeo Summa Credo: /I suppose I wouldn't mind if assistance went to people who had adequate income at the inception of the mortgage but have lost their jobs in the recession. Maybe.

Mighty nice of you there.

EatHam:
"The plan I'm announcing focuses on rescuing families who have played by the rules and acted responsibly,"

Those people don't need to be rescued.


So what your saying is ... no families who have played by the rules could have lost all their money one way or another?

You're probably right. And it's a good thing the job market is so well off right now that if you lose your income your still OK. Or get into an accident and health insurance will completly cover every cost.

/laying it on pretty thick

So, I bought a house 4 years ago that I could afford, have paid 80% of it off, just refinanced it to get my payments down to below $300 a month (just had a baby, need the extra cash) and will have it paid off in 3-ish years. How does Obama's plan help me?

Oh, it doesn't. I bought within my means, so I get the shaft. But the people we bought the house from, who in no way can afford the house they moved in to, gets federal assistance. Nice.

/Share the wealth, man.

Glad to hear it, but how will it be administered?

Homeowners who have mortgages of more than $500,000 are not likely to qualify for aid, as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will typically guarantee only loans for less than that amount in Arizona.

So if someone got a $450k mortgage, they could be bailed out ?

Doak: Maine-iac: What's wrong with flipping houses? I've re-habbed several junkers in the same neighborhood. The new owners love them. Now the neghborhood is nicer and the property values have gone up. Oh, and god forbid, I made a profit for my efforts.

I think the problem is that people took out loans for the expressed purpose of flipping houses. If you flip houses and you make a profit, more power to you. But if you flip houses and you take out a bunch of loans you can't afford, you shouldn't get government assistance.

But how do they make any money at all?

canyoneer: Glad to hear it, but how will it be administered?

Rectally?

How much bureaucracy is going to be needed to figure out who qualifies and who doesn't? And how much will THAT cost?

Lots of people bought responsibly and now are in danger. Not atypical cases - people in late 40s/early 50s, laid off (because corps always lay off the older/expensive folks). They bought their house when they had two good incomes. Being older, there are no job prospects for similar income, so they start their own biz and tap into the home equity and 401Ks to fund it. Now shiat is hitting the fan. Did they play by the rules? You make the call.

What about those recently foreclosed on? Do they get their house back with a better deal? What about people who do manage to keep up with their payments? They have taken a serious loss on the value of their home. That was their retirement. Do they get a check?

greatmoose: So, I bought a house 4 years ago that I could afford, have paid 80% of it off, just refinanced it to get my payments down to below $300 a month (just had a baby, need the extra cash) and will have it paid off in 3-ish years. How does Obama's plan help me?

Oh, it doesn't. I bought within my means, so I get the shaft. But the people we bought the house from, who in no way can afford the house they moved in to, gets federal assistance. Nice.

/Share the wealth, man.

my wife and I feel similarly. We bought a modest house that was within our means, (it was in our means when i was the sole provider, and was working at a call center, so you know its cheap) and dont have alot of debt. So we were responsible, and we're gonna get NOTHING.

great.

While I applaud the measures to prevent assistance going to 'flippers' I'm not sure I like the idea of forcing lenders into new mortgage terms.

This is great news for people that already have houses. Though I have a feeling this is going to put the housing market into a stagnation the likes of which we've never seen; after all, financiers aren't going to sit around and see their risk premiums completely depleted even for those who are 'high risk'. So they'll just jack up the prices on all future mortgages to make up for it. If you're in your teens or early 20s today, you can kiss that dream of owning a house by age 30 goodbye; well, you might get a house, but it's going to be much smaller and in a shiattier part of town compared to what you would have been able to afford if not for this brilliant plan.

So thanks for stabbing young people in the back, Democrats. We really appreciate it. We'll remember this in 2012.

Code_Archeologist: Some do, especially with the recession and people losing jobs. In the past if a member of a household lost a job for an extended period they could try to refinance the house to a lower monthly rate until the monthly income could be restored.

Now, that is almost impossible to do, and there are millions of families struggling to stay in a house that they could afford before the recession started.

I have to wonder if it is the government's business to get involved, but since they are involved in 1 in 5 home sales through Fannie Mae and Freddi Mac the answer has to be "yes."

Even if the government is justified in getting more involved it is nearly impossible to know how the family got in trouble. Did they have 6 months of savings before they bought their home? Do they have 2 or more car payments? Were they carrying a pile of unsecured debt before the last few months?

I might have bought a very reasonable house for my income, but have been leveraged to the hilt beforehand. Since they were giving out loans to pretty much anyone with a 600+ credit score, and a high debt to income ratio my "reasonable" house might have been the final nail in my debt ridden, financial coffin.

It is also possible that I'm a text book case of someone who lost their job, but was being responsible. My six months of savings is used up, I've sold everything I could to stay afloat, I have a lower paying job now and my wife went back to work, and I'm just trying to hang on to my house.

Land Ark: You also priced the home out of the range of someone who could have originally afforded it and used it to live in. You changed the makeup of the neighborhood and forced lower income people to buy somewhere else. You also probably increased the tax assessments of the exisiting home owners and probably forced people to lose their houses or refinance to outrageous rates to afford to continue to live there. But that certainly isn't part of how we got into this mess.

Ok, calm down skippy. I live in an area that has been "gentrifying" now for about 10 years. You know what happened? The people who have lived there for generations sold their two family houses for $700,000 in 2005 or 2006, or they split it into units and rent them out for a monthly income of around $3-4K a month. In addition, crime rates have gone down, the school system has improved, restaurants and business have flourished, and the people who still live there have a NICE neighborhood now.

what_now: Maine-iac: What's wrong with flipping houses? I've re-habbed several junkers in the same neighborhood. The new owners love them. Now the neghborhood is nicer and the property values have gone up. Oh, and god forbid, I made a profit for my efforts.

Great. You're doing it right. But the vast majority of people who flipped houses thought they could buy a house, throw a coat of paint on it, and sell it in a year for a 20% increase. That worked fine for a few years, but when the massively inflated housing prices started to normalize, these people were over their heads.

Buying a fixer upper and putting some serious elbow grease into it will almost always be a sound investment, but not if you buy 3 or 4 at a time and can't make the mortgage payments on them.

There is no bright, clear line between rehabillitation and speculation. Any real estate investment is a mixture of the two. The proposed plan is unworkable, in that it continues to play make-beleive with the real estate market, pretending that there are "good Guys" and "bad guys" and that they can tell the difference.

greatmoose: So, I bought a house 4 years ago that I could afford, have paid 80% of it off, just refinanced it to get my payments down to below $300 a month (just had a baby, need the extra cash) and will have it paid off in 3-ish years. How does Obama's plan help me?

I'm sure you'll get a sticker or something.

ZachF81: slap

...but How Can he Slap?!

"I have not lost my job, so I can pay my mortgage, but it (the home) is worth less than I owe," said Sharon Bonds of Surprise. "I'm not greedy. I'm not an investor. I just have my one home. This is going to help me."

Not greedy, just wants someone else to absorb the loss. No Surprise there.

Doak: OK Mr. President. How does it accomplish this? I just graduated from school. If I had been stupid and bought a home that I couldn't possibly afford for under $500K, I would deserve to have a loan refinanced? I mean I understand assisting those that get laid off during hard times, but there are plenty of people who were gaming the system by buying a home (even their FIRST home) that they couldn't afford. And now we're going to re-negotiate their stupid decisions to the tune of $75 Billion. And you know who's going to pay for it? People who didn't buy a home. People who (heaven forbid) pay rent instead of a mortgage. Home owners who paid off their mortgages. People who didn't make really stupid decisions.

You know, I'm really sick of hearing this. Banks aren't landlords--if the repo a house, the first thing they want to do is dump it, not sit on it. With 11 months of housing inventory in the market, no one wants that.

Quit acting like you don't get anything for it. You protect your biggest investment and avoid negative equity, which means you keep an open line of credit and a free option for yourself by having the choice to refi.

Despite what you may think, sometimes doing what's right for society can benefit you too.

You know who's getting the aid? Probably all the out of work realtors who can no longer afford their own homes.

/no, really i feel bad for anyone faced with losing their home
//but i rent...i can't afford to buy anything, so i don't
///USA is really becoming kind of a prisoner's dilemma kind of problem---i'm all for bailouts and socialism, but only if noone defects
////people always defect, apparently, unless there is a strong sense of ownership on what we're defecting on
//the fact that these bailouts come from the nation as a whole and not small communities is probably a bad sign

greatmoose: I bought within my means, so I get the shaft. But the people we bought the house from, who in no way can afford the house they moved in to, gets federal assistance.

Crocodilly_Pontifex: . So we were responsible, and we're gonna get NOTHING.

READ THE FARKING ARTICLE!!!!


biatching about this is like complaining that you've never gotten to use unemployment insurance because you've never lost your job.

EatHam: "The plan I'm announcing focuses on rescuing families who have played by the rules and acted responsibly,"

Those people don't need to be rescued.

Except that what if they find a new job 200 miles away from the house they've got a mortgage on? And what if the value of their home has depreciated so much that they can't sell it and pay off the loan? Because that's what's happening right now, to hundreds of thousands of American families. It's happening to my aunt and uncle, and their bank refuses to take a settlement even though the bank acknowledges they'd lost more money by foreclosing on the property. It's like Wachovia is intentionally farking themselves over just to fark over my aunt and uncle.

Shoring up the housing market is the fastest way to resolve the economic crisis. The toxic assets are called "toxic" because they are these subprime loans and non-subprime loans that are higher than the values of the properties that are securing the loans. Because no one knows which financial assets are toxic, no one is lending money because ever lending insitution is worried that the recipient could be insolvent and sitting on a bunch of these crappy home loans. The best, fastest way to detoxify the assets is to rewrite loans for millions of Americans and keep those homes in the hands of those borrowers. To do otherwise would risk the complete collapse of the entire housing market.

That being said, I do think it sucks that I chose to be responsible and I'm not getting a bail out. However, the alternative is not an option.