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Moral of the story, do not be in debt, do not get into debt
Moral of the story, do not be in debt, do not get into debt
Debt has it's problems, don't throw the baby out with the bath water though.
The video is very American centric - is this the case in other countries ie Australia?
Honestly I'm very happy this video was "American Centric" mortgage are by definition very complex and specific to each country but America has one the most complex financial and legal system on earth.
It shows how complex building a Fintech in US actually is , often due to how many different partners you will actually need to depend on.
In this specific case , you would need to have each partners offer an API that you could call to automate the mortgage workflow.
Obviously , due to the nature of the financial sector it's very likely those partners don't have those APIs and don't want to build them because they are sitting on a very profitable business and have no plan to change that anytime soon.
I can draw a comparison to Airbnb , where most of their jobs wasn't so much to build "disruptive tech" but to lobby local administration to let people rent their appartement to individuals , while hotel industry was lobbying the other way around.
It becomes even more complex when you realize you'll have to do this at global scale to build a unicorn.
Moral of the story, do not be in debt, do not get into debt
There are a few startups disrupting the mortgage industry. In the UK, Habito [1] is doing pretty well. Though I mostly know of Habito because I have had friends work for them as they have at least some of their systems have been written in Haskell [2]. [1] https://www.habito.com [2] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/habito-mortgage-broker
In the end found a cheaper deal through my own research. A broker is only as good as the percentage of market they cover.
Moral of the story, do not be in debt, do not get into debt
How is that the moral of the story? If anything, the government sponsored entities are artificially lowering interest rates which you can use to borrow, so it makes sense to take advantage of that cheap credit.
Artificially low interest rates may well benefit you to some tiny extent, but imagine just how much more benefit is given to a bank. You still take an enormous risk, staking all your livelihood, and the bank get a near free way to make money. That's not equitable.
The prime majority of people have no genuine need to own a home, yet the 100+ years of state+banks instilling the mortgage culture managed to make it look so. It hurts me to see that even intellectuals on HN don't seem to see through that.
Every time I raise that, somebody jumps with a calculator to show me "how much I miss out." I am not missing out anything of that, unlike near 2 millions of once well off, middle class Americans who got screwed by "a low risk mortgage"