Re: Obama's 2,000-point tumble

Rita wrote:
On Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:31:57 -0500, emily2@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:12:44 -0800, Rita <Rita@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:49:15 -0500, emily2@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:12:28 GMT, Jim10293@xxxxxxxxx wrote:


Do you feel good about paying the mortgages for people who got into
trouble? Why should those who could not afford to buy and rented have
to pay for those who bought in over their head. Did you pay for your
house? Do you make your payments? Why should you pay for people who
took money out of their house to live beyond their means. Rhetorical
questions. Because you are going to hear a lot of people pissed off
with that question. We still have many people in this nation who
believe in being responsible for their actions.
No, I don't feel good about paying mortgages for people who took on
mortgages they should have known they couldn't pay. As for those
who're in such agony because the value of their homes has gone down
dramatically, I didn't hear any of them complaining when the value
went up and they were using their homes as ATM machines. Obama says
that they're not going to bail out those people, but I don't know
exactly what the bill says or who is going to determine who did and
did not act responsibly.

All of this bailing out scares me, but I don't see that we have much
choice other than to hope it works eventually. And gripe, of course.

Since so much of our economy apparently depends on the housing market,
something has to be done. I don't know if what's being done is the
right thing or not, but if it isn't, maybe the next thing to be tried
will be. It doesn't matter how responsible you have been about paying
your mortgage, if half the houses on your block have foreclosure signs
on them the value of your house is going to go down. So stopping the
slide seems to be important.

We don't have a mortgage. I paid it off years ago. I don't like
being in debt.

What do you think McCain would be doing about the situation had he
been elected?
If more and more homes go into foreclosure, the value of your
home is going to continue to drop. Stabilizing the housing market
by preventing some, not all foreclosures, is going to benefit all
home owners.

The idea behind this is not to give people who didn't live up
to their obligations a free ride -- it is far bigger than that
as the mortgage crisis is one of the prime reasons for this
recession/depression.

People complain it creates a moral hazard by helping out folks
they don't believe deserve to be helped out. But if you look at
the larger picture there are dozens of reasons continuing waves
of home foreclosures are bad for all of us.

These homes are still overpriced in today's housing market and the
lenders will have to give also to make these bad loans into loans
that people can make the payments on.

If you blame the people who took out these mortgages you also have
to blame the lenders who encouraged them to do just that. But
passing blame around and doing nothing is not going to solve the
many problems foreclosures inflict on the economy.
I don't blame the people who took out mortgages they couldn't afford.
If the mortgage market had been functioning normally, there couldn't
have been enough of those people to make any appreciable impact on the
overall economic condition of the country. I place the blame for this
mess squarely on the lenders.

But I also agree with you that placing the blame is not going to help
except to whatever extent it makes us aware of the flaws in the system
so that we can possibly fix them.

I hope that the stimulus package will help, and I believe that if
anyone can lead us out of the wilderness, it's Obama. But I'm far
from 100% certain that it's even possible. I don't expect to see a
thriving economy again in my lifetime. If we can just avoid a total
economic collapse and massive unemployment with all the horrors that
would bring, I'll consider us lucky indeed.

I read that if you live close to a home that is in foreclosure, the
value of your home decreases some 9%. So rather than get up in arms
about some people getting something they don't deserve, it seems to
me in everyone's best interest to stop as many foreclosures as
possible. And the plan put forth will not be directed to those who
are clearly in over their heads -- more toward those who are not yet
delinquent but struggling to stay that way.

I haven't been a home owner for many decades, but I always wondered
if the value of homes was anything like what seemed to me inflated
prices over the last decade or so. I expect many homeowners here
believed they had quite a good thing going. There seems to have been
no general recognition that home prices could go no way but up.

Possibly Americans were living in a dream world -- if many seemed to do well with the housing bubble they didn't look further and ask "is
this real." And I am not talking just about those who had taken on
the shaky loans but all home owners. Value resides in what someone
will pay for your home -- not in its overall quality.



Lower value = lower property tax. :-)
.

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