<p>BC’s story above -
Whitmire says. “I’ve lost my home. I live in a trailer now because of a mortgage company and an incompetent government.”</p>
<p>It’s those statements that make me grimace. Whitmire doesn’t appear to acknowledge any personal responsibility. Something is fishy in that story. A $40,000 mortgage at 5% for 20 years would be a payment of $264. An acceptable house in small-town Indiana can be purchased for $40,000. The government is incompetent because, like every other business, they had employee layoffs? I won’t disagree Mitch is a hatchet man (he is), but in many of these instances, I don’t blame the government and bank. Read paperwork, buy less than one can, anticipate layoffs.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to sound harsh, but in many similar stories, the borrowers share much of the blame. The government did not force anyone to take large loans and buy too much house. Money is not free…ever.</p>
<p>As for fighting the gov’t, grrrr, I’ve had my share, especially with property tax appeals. Fairly successfully, but oh, an exercise in frustration :(</p>
<p>“Half of Americans Can’t Raise $2K in 30 Days
A quarter wouldn’t be able to come up with $2,000 at all, and another 19% would have to pawn or sell some of their possessions to do so.”</p>
<p>Mortgage rates in 2000 were 8-8.5%. That would make for a P+I of $300. Add property taxes of $80/month, and PMI of about $25/month and that gets to about $400/month. I suspect that this person had a higher interest rate because of the zero percent down. 2000 was not the crazy period of the bubble. There’s still about $200/month that is missing but they were able to make the payments with both of them working.</p>
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<p>His wife worked for the state and she lost her job in budget cutbacks. So I can understand blaming the government. They should have done a better job in planning and not overbuilding.</p>
<p>Blaming the bank? He was blaming the bank because they didn’t take ownership when he returned the keys because they didn’t want liability for the property even though they owned it. There’s a lot of criticisms of banks doing this by cities and towns and they have been trying to get the banks to maintain properties that they now own. Banks similarly don’t pay HOA fees which is a pain in the neck for other members of the HOA.</p>
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<p>There are others with less education, fewer job prospects and fewer extended resources that can’t do all of the things that we take for granted here. The guy sounds like he has worked manual labor all of his life and has some bodily injuries but he still tries to look for work. A $40K loan for a very modest house - I don’t begrudge a guy for trying - that’s not like buying an $800K home in CA on a $50K income.</p>
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<p>I’d argue that this person did not buy too much house.</p>
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<p>Towns don’t like to grant abatements - when they do, it opens up the floodgates.</p>
<p>I remember being like that when I was a lot younger. But I had a good-paying job and a good career ahead of me and I just kept getting raises. But I eventually learned to save and save like mad.</p>
<p>Older folks out there that have physical difficulties that don’t have training, education, relatives - I can see them not having any hope and hope can sustain us through the tough times. Some of us were brought up with traits that make it easier to get through the tough times; some won the parent lottery; some have good genes and some are plain lucky. But there are a lot of people, probably most, having a tough time out there. In many cases, we just don’t see them.</p>
<p>“Older folks out there that have physical difficulties that don’t have training, education, relatives - I can see them not having any hope and hope can sustain us through the tough times. Some of us were brought up with traits that make it easier to get through the tough times; some won the parent lottery; some have good genes and some are plain lucky. But there are a lot of people, probably most, having a tough time out there. In many cases, we just don’t see them.”</p>
<p>I like this and I like your prior post.</p>
<p>A friend and I were talking…and my friend said everybody should pay income taxes. I asked, " What about special needs people?</p>
<p>“They should pay income taxes”.</p>
<p>“Even if it is just a buck?”</p>
<p>“Yes. Even if it is just a buck. They have to have skin in the game”.</p>
<p>“Yes…but they don’t understand taxes. They can’t read a tax form. They are still going to need govenment support. It is inefficient to tax people and then give them back the money plus more”.</p>
<p>About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.</p>
<p>Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year.</p>
<p>Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less.</p>
<p>That statistic has got to be very demoralizing for those in college and for those about to graduate. The loans, the effort, it must start to feel futile. It does not bode well for the future of this generation.</p>
<p>A $40,000 house in Indiana, with residential and mortgage exemptions, would equal yearly property taxes of $150-300. I realize we don’t know the terms of the mortgage, but it’s difficult to get the math $600+ /month. In Hooterville, IN he’s going to pay $500-600 per month to rent on a house/trailer where the mortgage payments would be in the $250/mo. range.</p>
<p>I also think he probably did not over-buy. I was generalizing his complaints to the many who did over-buy.</p>
<p>I think that we see some of this in these forums from parents and in the majors forums from the perspective of unemployed or underemployed recent college graduates. It is hard out there for most but graduates need to keep trying and trying and trying. These tough times create a generation of adults that know how hard things can be and they may very well be able to manage the hardships down the road and appreciate the good times as being out of the ordinary as opposed to expecting it as the norm.</p>
<p>This kind of news really makes me anxious even though my college grad had pure dumb luck landing something (a TF was fed up with grad school and going to join a biotech and talked him into graduating a year early and following along). At the time, we thought it was an awful decision to forego recruiting and short-circuit his time as an undergrad but now we’re kind of relieved that he never has gone through the whole job search thing.</p>
<p>Sometimes from what I’ve observed among friends and acquaintances it can seem a little unjust in how it goes for kids. We know parents who are highly positioned at big banking firms or corporations who have kids who have majored in really whatever struck their fancy but who always sailed right into summer internships and jobs. It is just assumed mom and dad network on your behalf if you happen to be born into a family with those sort of connections. I don’t blame them a bit. If we could help our kids in that manner, we certainly wouldn’t hesitate. But it does make me feel for the kids who don’t have a social “in” anywhere.</p>
<p>We had to keep trying and trying back in 1986, too. Oil prices collapsed, and there were almost literally NO structural engineering jobs in Texas - DH and I were newly married and had just gotten our master’s degrees in structural engineering! We sent out 273 resumes all over the US. We got fewer than 10 responses of any kind, most of them discouraging. We finally got a call from a firm in Maine that interviewed and hired both of us. As we were struggling to buy our first house, I remember my father-in-law saying, “Things are sure tough for kids your age now. I wonder how you are going to make it?” Well, we made it fine with a little luck and a lot of saving. We had only one car for years. We both got laid off the same day in 1990. I took a bus downtown for a job that paid only $12/hour!! For an engineer with experience! DH got laid off a few times during the 90s. That’s why we started our firm in 1999. Thank goodness we had such a hard time working for other people, because now we love working for ourselves and do really well.</p>
<p>^ thank you for sharing that, MaineLonghorn. Immediate success right out of the starting gate isn’t always the best preparation for all the bends in the road ahead.</p>