U.S. foreclosure frenzy
- Thread starter dancing-loon
- Start date
Yes it is. It's all about watching the market and going for it when it's time...and never rushing into things.
It's a great way to make a living. ;-)
Not sure I should feel ashamed for being smart.
For a Janitor by trade my net worth is sort of sick.
I don't think anyone was referring to you Avro. It's great you've done well.
There is a reason why the S&P500 returned approximately an annual average of 11 or 12 % in the 90's through to '05-ish and yet the average investor recieved about 4%. Chasing yesterday's winners and getting caught in hype is the mistake the average person makes. That's how the big guys make their money. As Warren Buffett said, it's fear and greed. "When people are greedy I get fearful. When people are fearful I get greedy". Right now in Canada there is a lot of hype in real estate and fear of most other assets. We'll see how it plays out over the next few years.
On a personal level I look forward to the next year or two.
I'll be poaching some cottages soon.
Pisses me off because I just bought mine in a sellers market.
As long as you don't over-extend yourself. Read this article in The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/wa...hp&oref=slogin
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Instead of denying help clear across the board, they could examine case by case and help the hard-working and hard-hit immigrants to retain their home. It's traumatic for them and their children! Where would they go? Into public housing? If they can't pay the mortgage, they can't pay the high rent either.
The government wouldn't bail them out for nothing - they have to pay the government back eventually, or how does this bail-out work?
Do those who've been successful in making investment choices owe nothing more than their taxes and fees to the society in which their opportunities have been realized?
Because the wealthy pay more taxes and facilitate money-flow by distributing their money through purchasing more than those who don't enjoy greater wealth would, isn't it far more important in terms of maintaining the climate or "supporting the system" for the wealthy to be as equally shrewd when it comes to influencing social institutions and government?
Or perhaps it's little-fish-big-fish....
The wealtlhy get eaten by the extravagantly wealthy and the whole social strata simply keeps slipping downward.....
When Enron and Prudential and Bear Stearns and and and are revealed as being mismanaged with CEOs earning multi-million dollar salaries while their businesses go broke...isn't the real message that "Hey we don't care about anyone but ourselves and if you lose your home and lose your pension and lose your future...well them's just tough nuugies...."
On the other hand of course the vanishing middle class are trying their damndest to emulate the wealthy because after all perception is everything...and the poor are of course always being the way the poor have been...stooping to theft and chicanery while using drugs to avoid reality....
Oh wait now....I've stumbled on a loop...
Multi-millionaire rock stars and fashion models appear to have little qualms about dumping on everyone and anyone and heaven only knows...drugs are popular....
So maybe the drug abusing cheating poor are in many respects the higher target the wealthy are shooting for...
Strange world.....
Because the wealthy pay more taxes and facilitate money-flow by distributing their money through purchasing more than those who don't enjoy greater wealth would, isn't it far more important in terms of maintaining the climate or "supporting the system" for the wealthy to be as equally shrewd when it comes to influencing social institutions and government?
Or perhaps it's little-fish-big-fish....
The wealtlhy get eaten by the extravagantly wealthy and the whole social strata simply keeps slipping downward.....
When Enron and Prudential and Bear Stearns and and and are revealed as being mismanaged with CEOs earning multi-million dollar salaries while their businesses go broke...isn't the real message that "Hey we don't care about anyone but ourselves and if you lose your home and lose your pension and lose your future...well them's just tough nuugies...."
On the other hand of course the vanishing middle class are trying their damndest to emulate the wealthy because after all perception is everything...and the poor are of course always being the way the poor have been...stooping to theft and chicanery while using drugs to avoid reality....
Oh wait now....I've stumbled on a loop...
Multi-millionaire rock stars and fashion models appear to have little qualms about dumping on everyone and anyone and heaven only knows...drugs are popular....
So maybe the drug abusing cheating poor are in many respects the higher target the wealthy are shooting for...
Strange world.....
Dancing_Loon
Vultures and hyenas have been a part of human commerce forever. One man's shrewdness is another mans con game.....
What's happened and what's happening as we speak is that we are witnessing the outcomes of "shrewdness" as exercised by the wealthy for generations. A poor man nudging someone out of place in the line-up at the food bank doesn't make international headlines, but the corruption of the "backbone of America" as practiced by the wealthy does repeatedly.
We owe a great deal to the wealthy.......
Vultures and hyenas have been a part of human commerce forever. One man's shrewdness is another mans con game.....
What's happened and what's happening as we speak is that we are witnessing the outcomes of "shrewdness" as exercised by the wealthy for generations. A poor man nudging someone out of place in the line-up at the food bank doesn't make international headlines, but the corruption of the "backbone of America" as practiced by the wealthy does repeatedly.
We owe a great deal to the wealthy.......
That's what one gets when living in a free society! The vultures and hyenas are only stopped, if they hang themselves! People seldom regulate themselves and share their good fortune or invest it for the common good.
I once heard of an old man who had invested his savings by buying a tract of undesired land and kept adding to it over the years. He did it for nature, for wildlife and flora. It impressed me very much!
I come from poor peasant stock!:lol: My grandparents of both sides had many children they could hardly feed. The landowners they worked for had once been plunderers and crooks, now they were rich and lived in castles or big mansions. My father told me he never got enough to eat, was always still hungry leaving the table. They lived in little wee houses, with one bedroom, kids slept 3 or four in one bed! On Sundays the landowner would be driven to church in a fancy wagon with four horses. He and his company would sit in the front row on upholstered benches, while the poor workers stayed in the back, standing. The in-between benches were occupied by the families of the teacher, the merchants, the trades people... all the little ranks above the common laborer. My Dad decided then there was no God. Or if there was, he sure didn't care about the poor!
That, Mikey, was changed later by Hitler. And they hated him for it! But the workers rallied behind him, because he gave them some dignity, and most of all hope for a better future. Saving for a car or a house was within their reach finally, after hundreds of years of slavery!
Here is an amusing tidbit my Dad told us at the dinner table:
One day the big landowner came to his workshop (Dad was a wagon builder), and complained that he had received orders to provide proper outhouses for his workers! "For hundreds of years they **** behind the fences, but now they have to have an outhouse!!" he said, and shook his head. Of course, he himself in the castle had proper water toilets, that drained right into the lake!! And so my Dad built outhouses for quite a few dwellings that didn't have one.
There are other examples as well, but I mentioned this one, because I remember it myself.
Yes, we do!! Their excesses are shining examples for us to follow!!;-)
I wish you a lovely and sunny Sunday, dear Mikey.
The city council in the San Francisco suburb of Richmond voted narrowly early Wednesday to go where no municipality has dared go before: trying to use eminent domain laws to seize mortgages on homes whose values have dropped far below what’s owed.
Five years into the housing crisis, the city of about 105,000 and its Green Party mayor figure they’ve run out of better options – and out of patience with federal solutions that never came – to ease the local foreclosure glut. The median price of homes in town has dropped to less than half of what it was at the height of the housing boom. And the city has estimated that about 51 percent of its homeowners are underwater. Richmond is in worse shape than most towns sacked by the housing bubble: Its home values are low, its unemployment and poverty rates are high, and its residents in danger of foreclosure are unlikely to have the principal on their mortgages reduced any time soon
more
Why a Small California City Could Be Wall Street's Worst Nightmare [Updated] | Mother Jones
Five years into the housing crisis, the city of about 105,000 and its Green Party mayor figure they’ve run out of better options – and out of patience with federal solutions that never came – to ease the local foreclosure glut. The median price of homes in town has dropped to less than half of what it was at the height of the housing boom. And the city has estimated that about 51 percent of its homeowners are underwater. Richmond is in worse shape than most towns sacked by the housing bubble: Its home values are low, its unemployment and poverty rates are high, and its residents in danger of foreclosure are unlikely to have the principal on their mortgages reduced any time soon
more
Why a Small California City Could Be Wall Street's Worst Nightmare [Updated] | Mother Jones
Richmond would carry out the purchases with the help of Mortgage Resolution Partners, an advisory firm run by a politically connected group of investors. … After Richmond seizes the loans, new lenders arranged by MRP would step in and essentially refinance them. The borrowers would stay in their homes, and the new loans would reflect the current value of the properties. In this scenario, a family in Richmond that bought a $300,000 house that’s now worth $200,000 would see its monthly payments decrease by $300 to $800.
For more than a year now, MRP’s chairman, Steven Gluckstern, has been trying and failing to convince some of the cities worst hit by the foreclosure crisis to adopt his eminent domain plan. Politicians in San Bernadino, Salinas, and about a dozen other towns flirted with the idea to varying degrees before getting cold feet. But Richmond is supposed to be different: “We’re not willing to back down on this,” Richmond’s Mayor Gayle McLaughlin, a former schoolteacher, told the New York Times in July. “They can put forward as much pressure as they would like, but I am very committed to this program and I’ve very committed to the well-being of our neighborhoods.”
For deeper background on how this all would work, go here.For more than a year now, MRP’s chairman, Steven Gluckstern, has been trying and failing to convince some of the cities worst hit by the foreclosure crisis to adopt his eminent domain plan. Politicians in San Bernadino, Salinas, and about a dozen other towns flirted with the idea to varying degrees before getting cold feet. But Richmond is supposed to be different: “We’re not willing to back down on this,” Richmond’s Mayor Gayle McLaughlin, a former schoolteacher, told the New York Times in July. “They can put forward as much pressure as they would like, but I am very committed to this program and I’ve very committed to the well-being of our neighborhoods.”
No, I'm from Oklahoma. Thankfully, FAR from Oklahoma.
I work in Washington, DC and live in suburban Maryland. Housing's good here.
I ask because you hear the horror stories re: mass foreclosure rates.... Based on the (sensationalist?) news casts, you'd think that every 3rd house in America was in default.
Not quite, but it's pretty bad. When you consider that house value is well over half of the total wealth of most home-owning Americans, foreclosures are a sign of Very Bad Things. Essentially, being forclosed upon means a family is [dwama]ruined![/dwama]
Here's a table on foreclosures from 1990-2010. http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1194.pdf
When roughly one out of twenty families is financially wrecked every year, you got a problem.
No doubt... Factor-in the demographic shift of the boomer's (attempting) retirement and it is a recipe for societal hardship for a number of years to come.
When the market was overpriced to begin with it makes no sense for governments to meddle in an attempt to sustain high prices. I suspect they are more interested in maintaining the high tax value more than anything else. Eminent domain would not apply for what they are attempting anyway.
