Suburban Ohio Man Resists Forclosure with Direct Action

All of these things you are ignorantly accusing him of not having tried, he tried. Short sale, renting out rooms, loan remods...the works. He's been going through this for a year. I talked with him at length today, not only him but people who have known him for years..his neighbors (you know like the real ones who live next door) and he really has tried everything. He doesn't even want to keep the house.

So, if he doesn't want to keep the house, what's the point?

Listen, I understand that foreclosure is a painful process - I get that. And I do feel empathy for the borrower. But if he can't make the payments, he needs to do the right thing - And that is, move on. Turn the keys over to the bank, vacate the property, and get on with your life.

So don't think your petty ideas of "Well he signed a contract, it's his own dumb fault" will ever get very far with me. Yeah...he signed a contract. And yeah, he trusted that the banker was telling him the truth when he signed it. He's 53!! That's his generation. The trustworthy banker and honest business.

It's not the bank's fault that the borrower didn't understand his loan contract. Even after the loan closed, the borrower could have taken all of the loan documents to an attorney who could have easily explained his loan if he had any questions.

It's up to the borrower to understand what he is signing - Not the other way around. If he signed a contract - any contract - and didn't know what he signed, then that is his own fault. Lesson learned. Get counsel. Read the fine print. Truly understand what you are signing.

The borrower took a risk - He was betting that the house would appreciate, and he could cash out later with a hefty check for the appreciated equity. He gambled, and lost. The borrower was greedy.

Now, he wants to blame his banker, instead of his own greed, for his losses. If the house had appreciated threefold, I am sure he wouldn't have been crying the blues.

The banker was a banker and essentially conned him into signing onto something with rosy promises of the future and fed him dreams of future home equity.

Sounds more like a broker, not a banker. A sub-prime mortgage broker. These are the ones that were selling these sub-prime loans. Most retail banks were buying this paper, not originating these kinds of loans.

Regardless of who exactly originated the loan, no one put a gun to his head and made him sign the contract.

He wasn't conned. Naive, perhaps. Stupid even. But not conned. To be conned, someone would have had to profit.

I can assure you that the bank isn't profiting from the onslaught of all of these defaulted loans. Hence, bank failures. Every Friday. Like clockwork. Unprecedented.

"Of course it's in the bankers best interests to get that loan paid back" How so, when they have essentially driven down property values through bogus loan trading, created this foreclosure crisis and then bought up the foreclosed homes in huge lots for pennies on the dollar. It's having your cake and eating it too and probably the most disgusting displays of callous economic barbarism in modern history

Sub-prime mortgage brokers, who wrote fraudulent loan applications, are the main cause of this crisis. They wrote fraudulent loan applications, as did borrowers. They inflated people's incomes on loan applications, and outright lied about a borrower's income, capacity to repay, job history, etc. They even doctored credit reports. Sometimes, borrowers didn't even exist - Hence the term, "straw buyer". Fraud on a massive scale to defraud banks.

Banks were defrauded by these brokers, and these borrowers. Banks wrote checks for $200,000 houses that are now worth $100,000, and the borrowers have skipped town leaving the bank holding the bag. Banks got royally screwed in this process.

The formal term is mortgage fraud. The loser is the bank. The bank is who gets defrauded when mortgage fraud takes place. Unfortunately, there was so much mortgage fraud, that there aren't enough resources to prosecute these crooked brokers and borrowers.

So, no, I don't have a lot of sympathy for crooked borrowers that lied on their loan applications, inflated their income, doctored their job history, and now cry the blues because they can't afford a home they never deserved in the first place. A lot of these people never put any money down, and never made a single payment, let alone pay property taxes and property insurance! Must be nice!

And, I might add, banks are NOT buying up foreclosed properties. Investors - and some big name Wall Street investment outfits - are buying foreclosed properties, not traditional brick and mortar retail banks. Retail banks are doing everything to unload these properties as fast as possible, not buy them.

[edit on 4-5-2010 by CookieMonster09]

reply to post by 4by4dave


Yes, he overbought. Did he care about his future 20 years ago? Did he not save anymoney for 20 years? Should the rest of society have to pay for his poor financial procedures and lack of planning?

I bought a forclosed home from one of these poor forclosure folks. The poor guys tried their best to hold onto the house for 3 months before it went back to bank. All the while, they had full cable t.v., leather furniture, cable internet, 2 brand new cars, etc. These luxorious items were in the picture of the for sale website.

It was their own fault for trying to have it all and not worry about how they were going to pay for it. At any time, the autoworkers knew damn well that their jobs were at risk. NO big secret.

I bought a house in Cleveland, OH for 80,000. One year later my grandmother got sick, and I had to relocate to take care of her. My wife also lost her job. I held on to that house for two years by my teeth, living in a 2 bedroom dump with crack heads living upstairs, so that I didn't go back on my obligation to pay back money to the bank who trusted me to pay them back. I finally sold the house for 30,000 and recently paid off the other 50,000 that I have nothing to show for.

I paid someone else to take my house, just so I can say that I did everything I could. I am a better person because of this.