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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)

#151

Post by nunez »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #52
silisili wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just discussing this with a friend last week. In my case at least, it was too easy to forget. I grew up low end of middle class at best, and after high school was dirt poor. Getting overdrafts weekly, in that era where they reorder transactions to really turn the screws. Sleeping early because it's cheaper than eating. Working two jobs and still not getting ahead. The shame of having to ask to borrow a few buck…

> in that era where they reorder transactions to really turn the screws I cannot come up with the words about how absolutely evil someone had to be to make transactions work that way. How utterly fucked up and sociopathic do you have to be to steal money from the poor?

I mean, it's complicated.

On one hand, payday loan services and buy here pay here auto dealers are providing capital and transport to people that can't afford it and absolutely need it.

On the other hand, the risk of not seeing their money or vehicle back is insanely high.

That said, the transaction reordering that BoA/other banks did was insanely cruel. I was affected all of the time by this during college before I got my first job. Learning how to overdraft "correctly" was an insanely useful skill back then!

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

#153

Post by nunez »

honkycat wrote: post #50

My parents build a big ass house in the middle of nowhere around the year 2000 It was a nice place! rooms for the kids, a pool, etc. Then 2008 hit. WOW. We went from a prosperous family to NOTHING incredibly fast. This asset was so toxic the bank wouldn't even fucking take it. It was an albatross for YEARS and my parents had to liquidate their 100 year old family business, and all other assets before they could wiggl…

Basically the story of most of the Midwest. Suburbanization and the auto industry globalizing their supply chains was the one-two punch that sent most of those big cities into downward spirals. I'm reminded of this every time I fly into STL, MCI or CVG. (These were two massive hubs for Braniff, then Delta. Huge, huge airports, both of which are shells of their former selves.)

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

#154

Post by nunez »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #59
santoshalper wrote: post #13

I have spent about 20 years in the mortgage and housing industry, a decent amount of that in servicing and default. I have seen some shady shit including borrowers who committed mortgage fraud and lenders who made loans they knew would ultimately blow up in someone's face (not theirs!). That said, 99% of defaults are very simple: At the time of the loan, the borrower could afford to make the mortgage payment. Later d…

Maybe you have some insight over something that's always confused me. During the 2008 crash, I heard of a lot of people seeing their home value plummet, end up underwater on their mortgage, and decide to just abandon it. I've never understood why someone would do that, rather than ride it out and keep paying while the value recovers? I could MAYBE understand going "Nope, I'm out" if you had an adjustable-rate mortgag…

ARMs were insanely popular before the GFC and were what most lenders pushed onto customers, if I understand the history correctly. This + many customers budgeting for the bottom of the ARM = hurricane of foreclosures.

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

#156

Post by yonran »

jalapenos wrote: post #135
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.

There wasn’t much of a bubble. The price bubble that people cited is mostly explained by exclusionary zoning driving up rents in Closed Access cities (e.g. New York, San Francisco, Boston) and migration from those cities to Contagion cities (e.g. Phoenix, Las Vegas, Seattle). There was no reason for the government to destroy home values nationwide in cities that had no boom at all (e.g. Atlanta). And given that since the Great Recession, rents and prices have risen even higher than the peak of the “bubble” in Closed Access cities, we now can see that the entire Recession was pointless since the Fed killed the homebuilding industry in Contagion cities but didn’t address the root of the problem in Closed Access cities.

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

#157

Post by mrguyorama »

nunez wrote: post #145

Man, Reddit used to be amazing before it got TikTok-ified. Super high quality content (like this); a lot of which was real. Why can't we have nice things?

Nice things are fundamentally less profitable than trash. Everything that makes a thing "nice" costs money, eats into your profit margins, takes more work, while making more profit on something with a fixed "nice"ness is much much easier.

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

#158

Post by sangnoir »

Borg3 wrote: post #136
rufus_foreman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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...

Without property tax, who pays for the infrastructure and first responders? The no taxes, no rules, and no local government services thing was tried many times without success: in one New Hampshire town, they got overran by bears[1] - who could have guessed regulations on trash handling and animal control might be good for something?

1. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...

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

#159

Post by BobaFloutist »

Borg3 wrote: post #136
rufus_foreman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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...

Just wait until you hear what happens if you stop paying rent.

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

#160

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

nunez wrote: post #151
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in that era where they reorder transactions to really turn the screws I cannot come up with the words about how absolutely evil someone had to be to make transactions work that way. How utterly fucked up and sociopathic do you have to be to steal money from the poor?

I mean, it's complicated. On one hand, payday loan services and buy here pay here auto dealers are providing capital and transport to people that can't afford it and absolutely need it. On the other hand, the risk of not seeing their money or vehicle back is insanely high. That said, the transaction reordering that BoA/other banks did was insanely cruel. I was affected all of the time by this during college before I…

> payday loan services and buy here pay here auto dealers are providing capital and transport to people that can't afford it and absolutely need it.

They're exploiting people that are alright struggling, for sure.

But transaction reordering is just on an entirely different level. You're taking someone who actually has money and then cooking the books to make it look like they didn't, and then charging them for it.

IMO, it should have been considered outright fraud. Banks should have been forced to reimburse all the fees they took, in addition to significant punitive damages. I wonder how many people got evicted because their bank reordered their paycheck to come after their rent check and groceries, and the multiple overdraft fees made them no longer have money for rent.

Did banks ever come up with a justification for reordering? Not that it would be a good one, of course.

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