cheers

Thanks Rod.
I just got up LV time!
OK I just read on a thread I started here that you cannot give blood in the UK if you lived in the US for a period. I think they said March to November and they didn't say what year so I think it must have been 2010.
Yep you can't give blood. I don't think you can give blood anyway.

Very interesting about your friend. I think he would have had to stash that $20K money away from the prying eyes of the banks.
My son, in LV, walked away from his house, or his ex did, and they didn't go the same route and didn't live rent free. I wonder why? Pity because they had put $100,000 down on the house 5 years earlier.
As for your friends credit being ruined, that maybe a good thing because now he wouldn't get into debt and don't worry businesses are going to realise that there are so many out there with sour credit and they want to sell goods so they will offer them and olive branch IMO. Me, I have been lucky and pay my bills on time but the banks are harassing me, well two anyway, because my debt ratio is too high and they have required me to close my accounts with them. Thats OK with me.

I don't know about the UK but this charging 22% interest in the US is criminal in my books and at this point with the banks running the government there isn't going to be any relief.
Rod if you could get hold of the film by Michael Moore called Capitalism with Love it would reinforce your beliefs as to what is going on.

jasper123

Well all I can say is if you dangle that carrot above the nose of enough people then you will get a whole lot of gullible people who are going to grab it, thats what the brokers did, they found a way, an opportunity to fool the people and in the process make a lot of money, but the only way it could work is if the banks were just as corrupt and greedy and let all those ineligible applications get through, --- and the poor people that were conned are not saying its not there fault, they are saying though that they were gullible, --- but they the poor homeowners also belive that they did not create this problem, it was all about greed and no sanctions or regulations in place to prevent it,
So you just find this all so reprehensible and an indictment on US debt and mortgage law do you OMG:rifle: Pleeeese

cheers

Ron, I was thinking along the same lines when I read this but any time people can hit the banks I'm there to cheer them on.
I agree people knew of the fallacy of what they were being told but at the same time it is a case of get on the train or get left behind because prices were going up so fast.
I'm interested how this is all going to play out because in the papers each day they are reporting the legal proceedings in the courts related to foreclosures.
It's my belief that the banks control congress so they will force the government to take over the banks debt or else.

dunroving

Pleeeese what? It's OK not to pay your debts but save up $20,000? Pleeeese right back at you.

I'm currently in a hole with my UK house and recently turned down a job opportunity in the US because I decided it wasn't worth taking a £40k hit by selling up and losing all the capital I have invested in the house.

The idea of simply defaulting and letting the UK taxpayer carry the budren of what I owe wouldn't even occur to me. It would be the same if I lived in the US. I'm no fan of the greedy bankers, but all this talk of people being "trapped" and "fooled" and "conned" (all your words) into taking out mortgages is a load of baloney. Two wrongs (greed followed by lack of personal responsibility) don't make a right.

cheers

Barbara are you too young to remember when they ran the boat from the Pier 'ead to Llandudno?

Mummy in the foothills

I can understand people who have lost their jobs defaulting on the loan and walking away, not really much else they can do with no jobs about.
But the ones by us who bought in 06 and 07 who went out and bought another house in 09 10 for half the price of the one they were living in and then let the one from 06 07 go under make me sick. They are the ones who were still working and earning the same, they could afford the mortgage yet walked away for financial reasons. They are glutting the market with lovely homes that are sitting empty, and till they are all sold, no will even look at my little house. We bought in 93 so we won't lose money, but we won't make hardly anything either. Not enough to buy in UK like we had planned, downsizing without a mortgage. Now we could buy a garden shed.

Mummy in the foothills

I have vague memories of a big boat at the end of Llandudno pier. I was probably in a pushchair

dunroving

Yes, unfortunately people like that don't think of the effects of their actions on other less morally-challenged people.

Pistolpete2

Fortunately for the big banks while interest rates for their finance are next to zero and they are lending on decent margins they are making sufficient profits to be able to write-off the expenses associated with their bad lending practices and the junk they passed on to Fannie Mae without too much damage to their overall bottom line but we have any number of more years of foreclosures and lawsuits relating to dodgy paperwork to go yet.....and the property market shows, overall, no signs yet of bottoming-out.

This all seems to suggest that the banks will be screwing everybody for fees and high/unjustified rates for a long time yet if only to rebuild the requisite capital bases after this fiasco. They shouldn't need to go to Congress for more help than that.

dunroving

The British banks are similar - BOE rate is at 0.5%, but the banks simply increase the margins so borrowers (including small businesses, who supposedly are the ones who will drag us out of this recession) can barely afford the lender's fees and conditions.

cheers

I just got a notice from Bank of America and they want to start charging me $59 a year for their Visa credit card.

I'm just a poor senior on a fixed income blah, blah, blah

dunroving

In my experience, and according to most of the money pages, if you call them up and say you simply can't afford it and plan to switch to another company, they will waive the fee.

And if they don't, then switch to another company.

cheers

My inclination is to close the account because I have more than enough credit cards.
I charge around $700 a month on my American Express but I always pay it off when I get the bill. Its weird that I charge everything from a $ up on the card and I don't carry any cash. Actually I do have $10 in my wallet as we speak

cheers

A thought just acurred to me related to these posts and the banks creating their own problems and that is my wife is getting all this mail inviting her to open up a credit account with free interest for a year. This is because she has good credit. Me, no such offers.

I would think that we would have the same credit BTW.

sallysimmons

The problem is that they're not hitting the banks - the banks will always find a way to make their profit. They're hitting the rest of us. They're hitting the people who only bought a house they knew they could afford, who took out a fixed mortgage, who didn't let greed persuade us to buy a bigger and better house, but settled for what was in our means. We are the ones who suffer when people just walk away from their responsibilities because with so many abandoned houses, we can't sell ours. And we can't just walk away the way Rod's friend did because we did the responsible thing in the first place and put our own money in as a down payment.

I am all for helping people who are genuinely suffering but the people who took out mortgages they could never afford and then walked away when reality hit? They're the ones who are stopping people like Trotty from having what she has worked and dreamed for and I think that's just plain wrong.

The fact is the greedy mortgage brokers could only succeed by finding home buyers who were also greedy enough to believe their bullcrap.