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My job is to watch dreams die (2011)

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Re: My job is to watch dreams die (2011)

#131

Post by topkai22 »

naming_the_user wrote: post #54
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For a guy like the one in the post to show up, you probably would have had to completely ignore probably a dozen of these documents for at least 6 months, not paying your mortgage all along. I find it interesting that in all of these discussions it's treated as known that the person at hand is ignoring the notices and just pretending they aren't in danger of losing their home, just like in issues of evictions for r…

I think it's a bit less dramatic than that really - most people accept that the world we live in has both rights and responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is that by paying for the loans you take out, in exchange you get to keep the things that you've bought using them, permanently once you've paid it off. I might, one day, be unable to pay my mortgage. That's a risk I'm taking. People tend to get super emo…

I think you underestimate how painful moving is to some people.

Any house I lived in for more than a year or two I miss. It can be really painful to remember I can’t take my kids to my childhood home because my parents moved. Heck, I occasionally miss living in the first house I bought and I’m just renting that one out.

I don’t disagree that people need to pay their mortgages, but we also should recognize that there are real externalities involved. Thinking you had stability and then losing it hurts. Being forced to relocate hurts. Feeling like you failed your family hurts. Those undergoing that deserve grace, compassion, and understanding. Sometimes they also deserve our charity.

It will still often be necessary for those people to move, but it’s not just a financial transaction for those being forced to leave their home.

Re: My job is to watch dreams die (2011)

#132

Post by lnsru »

firesteelrain wrote: post #125

I have become cynical on Reddit to the point that I don’t know if these stories are real or just really good creative writing

It might be good creative writing. But a businessman who I knew got stroke and died around the time. His real estate projects became worthless basically in one week. So from the timing I would say, that the writing might be real.

Re: My job is to watch dreams die (2011)

#133

Post by tacitusarc »

dmd wrote: post #93
hunter-gatherer wrote: post #33

I've had a handful of lemons thrown at me during my life. One of the most impactful ones as far as I can tell is that through a weird chain of coincidences I ended up first in line to purchase a foreclosed home. From what I understood, the couple was going through a nasty divorce and couldn't agree on who would get the house and ultimately didn't pay anything for a while, so I picked it up for 80k, which back then wa…

> a handful of lemons I'm having trouble parsing this. A lemon is a bad thing that happens to you, but this seems like it was a good thing for you?

I assume the previous owners stopped by to pelt him with lemons.

Re: My job is to watch dreams die (2011)

#134

Post by Bluestein »

tacitusarc wrote: post #133
dmd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a handful of lemons I'm having trouble parsing this. A lemon is a bad thing that happens to you, but this seems like it was a good thing for you?

I assume the previous owners stopped by to pelt him with lemons.

You know what they say, "make lemonade" and all that :)

Re: My job is to watch dreams die (2011)

#135

Post by jalapenos »

yonran wrote: post #69

The tragedy is even sadder when you find out that the foreclosure crisis and Great Recession were self-inflicted by the Federal Reserve and CFPB after 2007, not the inevitable result of reckless borrowers. Kevin Erdmann has been studying this for about a decade and gives examples of cities such as Atlanta that had no housing boom at all but were forced into foreclosure crisis. Here is his most recent op-ed: https://w…

Actually they were inflicted by the Fed dropping rates to zero following the tech bubble bursting (2000), blowing up a real estate bubble.

You'd think the USSR would've been enough to stop people believing in central planning. But this is unlikely, since the desire for central planning is actually an innate instinct - a child wanting parents to handle everything for them.

Re: My job is to watch dreams die (2011)

#136

Post by Borg3 »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #78
hunter-gatherer wrote: post #33

I've had a handful of lemons thrown at me during my life. One of the most impactful ones as far as I can tell is that through a weird chain of coincidences I ended up first in line to purchase a foreclosed home. From what I understood, the couple was going through a nasty divorce and couldn't agree on who would get the house and ultimately didn't pay anything for a while, so I picked it up for 80k, which back then wa…

>> Having been able to pay off my house has had the most tremendous postive impact on my mental health I think Agree on that. I own my house with no mortgage since before the pandemic and it doesn't make much financial sense to pass up a 3% mortgage but it makes mental health sense. Yes, I owe property taxes. Yes, the city could raise them. If I completely stopped paying them today, it would take them a decade to kic…

Holy shit... That property tax is awfull thing. It should never ever happen. Not to simple people, owning one property, aka home. So much freedom, country of dreams...

Re: My job is to watch dreams die (2011)

#138

Post by animal531 »

hunter-gatherer wrote: post #109
dmd wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, thus my question. In that phrase, a "lemon" is a bad thing that is happening to you, which you turn somehow into something good (lemonade).

Lol. Maybe I've misunderstood this idiom my entire life. I've always taken the lemon to be a sort of neutral player since it isn't always trivial to make something better out of a neutral (ie to see the opportunity) and is even less trivial to make a positive spin on a negative thing.

Haha there are two different idioms in play here.

- "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade" - Make something positive out of something negative.

- Using Lemon as a descriptor of something, e.g. "I bought a Lemon", or "It turned into a Lemon" - Usually indicates that there was some unknown defect in the product, e.g. the car you bought stopped working after a week, or the house you bought on the cheap turned out to be made up of 90% termites and only 10% wood.

Re: My job is to watch dreams die (2011)

#139

Post by firesteelrain »

dhosek wrote: post #130
firesteelrain wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During the mortgage crisis, taxes were waived. Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act of 2007 allowed for the exclusion of taxes on forgiven mortgage debt. Many people used that law in conjunction with HAFA or HAMP. Myself in particular conducted a short sale during this time and did not pay taxes on the difference.

I went through a short sale in 1996 and as it turned out, the taxes that I ended up owing were identical to how much I was behind on my mortgage. One of the things that I had been told over and over back then was that I didn’t want to declare bankruptcy, but in retrospect, it turns out that declaring bankruptcy would have been exactly what I wanted to do. I remember thinking during the mortgage crisis when folks were…

That period of time was very rough. We bought our first home in 2006 for $134k and by 2007 it was worth about $59k. Even after adding on to it by converting our porch to another room, we ran out of room fast with the birth of our second child. I had one bedroom for one child who was about 5 or 6 and the second shared it with us. Since we couldn’t sell it with that much difference - we simply didn’t have the money to make up that difference - we ended up conducting a short sale in 2012. I rented until 2014 then used the VA Home Loan to buy my home which I have lived in for the past 10 years. It took 7 years to clear my credit report. But VA was very forgiving and the banks were OK to provide a mortgage at that time with VA backing. So it was less of a risk.

Re: My job is to watch dreams die (2011)

#140

Post by mcphage »

dmd wrote: post #105
mcphage wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lemon is a bad thing that happens to you, but this seems like it was a good thing for you? Probably referencing "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade", not like a car is a lemon.

Yes, thus my question. In that phrase, a "lemon" is a bad thing that is happening to you, which you turn somehow into something good (lemonade).

> a "lemon" is a bad thing that is happening to you

I guess in this case, the lemon is a bad thing in general, not specifically to them.

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