Edit - Added this video, October 6, 2008
The housing market has become catastrophic since I wrote this post in July, and the overall economy is gasping for its last breaths. Here's a remarkable video that shows and makes very personal what the mainstream media rarely shows. Hat tip to Macon D. for passing this along. If you like it, here's the site for more.
Inland Empire, CA: the poster child for the foreclosure crisis
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Some of you own property, a time share, or have loans and credit card debt up the wazoo. You're barely keeping your nose above water and have a feelin' that you'll soon drown.
I've never been a deadbeat, but I like this guy's attitude given that so many of us will hit financial rock bottom and become destitute from the impending new Great Depression. This will occur immediately after the election unless SHTF before then. If applicable to you, heeding this advice could soften or prevent your fall.
This article is also very useful if you rent and own no property, but your credit cards and loan debts will make it hard for you to pay that rent, buy food, and afford gas or bus fare to survive.
In the above photo:
Burning money became cheaper than burning wood.
1923 - Germany, when inflation was out of control
several years prior to the Great Depression
and this partly led to World War II.
Burning money became cheaper than burning wood.
1923 - Germany, when inflation was out of control
several years prior to the Great Depression
and this partly led to World War II.
It makes no sense to have to sell your car to pay your house note when your home is valued half of what it used to be, while hoping to get another job, only to be in the same financial stranglehold the following month but now without wheels. To spare you impoverishment, I am reprinting an excerpt from this article. ~ Kit
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Your house – lose it. Give up on it (assuming you are having problems paying for it.) You can buy the same house in 2 years for 2001 prices and get it for a few hundred thousand dollars less. If you are in duress and having problems with the payment, stop paying it. Stay in the house as long as you can. Fight the foreclosure at every turn. Doing the 'right thing' by paying your bills until you go broke and lose everything anyway is not good economic sense for you and your family. If you continue to try to keep up you will not only lose the house but you will be destitute and heading towards homelessness. Pride destroys finances.
Fight the foreclosure – Answer any papers sent to you by the bank. You will have 20 days to respond, wait til 18 go by and overnight it. Complain about the loan and the company and the mortgage broker. They will have 20 days to respond. And so on and so on. This will give you 3 to 12 months in your house rent and mortgage free.
The bank is overwhelmed with properties. Law forbids them from owning too much property. Due to this, the foreclosure could be pushed off for a long time. You can even try to ‘fake’ sell it with a realtor for some real high price or some 'never going' to happen short sale.
These methods, depending on the lender could give you 2 years or more in your house with no payments. Why go broke? Save your money in a hole in the ground. Help your family survive and forget your 'honor.' The lender could not care if you lived or died. They knew what they were doing. Until someone else owns it, it is your property.
Plan for your bankruptcy - Don’t go nuts on your credit cards, but use them up if you cannot pay them. Do not go bankrupt until the month your house is going to foreclosure sale. This will give you an additional three months. Even more if you can work something out with the attorney to delay the proceedings. That is at least 3 more months of living free. Watch excessive spening on cards or huge items going back 12 months before bankruptcy. Hide your cash.
This is especially important if you lost your job. The bank will not go under if you do not pay them, but your family will starve if you feel honor bound to pay the crooks, I mean lenders and credit card companies, til you are really broke and destitute.
Learn how to send cease and desist orders to creditors you are going to bankrupt so they leave you alone.
Realize you are talking about surviving here. You need your car and a roof over your head. You need money to live and eat for you and your family. Don’t worry about breaking the hearts of the crooks that made this mess or the credit card companies (read: loan sharks.) Worry about you.
Feel bad, like you are using the system? These scumbags have received 100s of billions of dollars of our taxpayers money for being crooks. And the CEOs made millions more. So, F#ck em, burn em back. Worry about you and your family not some billionaire. They borrowed the money to lend to you. They got it at 0.25% interest (that is a quarter point) and sold it to you on some screwed up plan that is going up to 8% or more. They will (and are) being bailed out by our loving congress and the lender still made tons on the interest they earned from you over a few years.
After your bankruptcy move into a nice rental and relax. You should have little or no debt. If you still have your job you may be on a small repayment plan, but you will be fine.
Before you rent, you may want to read this article to protect yourself from making a bad rental choice.
In two years from now the prices will have hit real rock bottom and stay there. 2001 prices. Now you can look into buying a house, maybe even the same one, at less than half of what you had originally bought it for. Yea, you will have a bankruptcy, but so will everyone else. You have some credit, maybe a card or two, a car loan.
Best of all, your family is well fed, safe roof over their head, and you still have a lot of money in that hole somewhere.
In other words, survive and let the multi billionaires who have ripped everyone off for so long get some heat. You and your family come before any crooks like the lenders. Your family first, lenders last.
Wisdom – you did not get out when you could have. The experts, who have a vested interest in making you spend your money, told you it would be fine. They lied. Take care of yourself, the next year is going to be a bitch.
To read more of Bob Hoffman's article, go here:
http://www.politicalgateway.com/news/read/140497
Consulting a bankruptcy attorney will be worth his/her fee to determine if this is right for you.
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Next Day Addendum - 7/24/2008:
The good news in brief:
1) Gas prices inexplicably eased down. This happens just before every single election, so I'm not impressed.
2) Bush backed off from vetoing the $25 billion dollar Senate bill that would save Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - the mortgage lenders that provides 80% of all housing loans - from collapsing.
His reason for wanting to veto it in the first place? He objected to a $3.9 billion dollar provision in the bill that would give community block grants to buy up and repair repossessed homes.
While that's not exactly pocket change, it looks out for communities instead of corporate parasites. He'd have never signed the bill with this attached provision if the housing market wasn't in it's death throes, but hey George, you win some, you lose some.
This will buy us a little more time. Maybe.
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I don't think I could do this. I would feel like I was doing something wrong.
ReplyDeleteI understand the companies are shady, but I would feel like I was just as bad as them. I don't know. I'm praying things don't come to this, but they might.
I'm with you, Big Man, and I'll bet the majority of my readers feel the same way you do.
ReplyDeleteHowever, if the financial gurus with the best predictive track records are correct, later this year or next will be deja vu of the Great Depression for many Americans. I'm already seeing a couple people I know personally go down hard, not to mention news stories.
Thus, I re-printed this article as a last ditch solution for those who have to chose from being unable to provide for their families and living in a homeless shelter or the street, since most shelters are for women with children only.
Oh man, I loved that article/advice on dealing with the impending doom we call our economy.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't mind, I'd like to gank that article and email it to a few friends.
If I was in dire straights right about now, I guarantee you, my black ass would ride it till the wheels fell off like dude advised.
Then after a year, I'd put everything in my kids name like some of "us" do...
lmao
Sounds like the article advises taking the easy way out at the expense of others. This "stick it to the banks" attitude would be justified if they signed you up for some kind of ballooning interest rate mortgage without your knowledge, but otherwise it's pretty irresponsible to avoid paying your bills when you have money to put in a hole in the ground, as the article says. People not paying their bills is a big reason why we're in this crisis. And yes, it has caused banks to close, despite what the article says.
ReplyDeleteNow, I forgive those people who were tricked or who couldn't find jobs that paid enough to cover the bills after getting laid off (not finding a job isn't an excuse - BK is always hiring).
Everyone else needs to take a cue from our grandparents and save money before spending it, because the credit card companies force no one to use all that plastic.
Wait to have kids, eat ramen noodles, go without cable TV, cell phones, DVDs, CDs, new clothes, beer, smokes, etc. If you're in the city, take the bus or walk if you can't afford car payments. Plenty of people do it. And for cryin' out load read the newspaper, even if its the copy at the library.
Now that's financial advice that could save your A$$.
At this point, wealthy people are walking away from their mortgages too, not just the working and middle class folks. Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac are dead. The housing market has gone bust. The house you paid $500K for two years ago is worth half that much now or will be soon, as the new Great Depression is at our doorstep.
ReplyDeleteThe wealthy have figured out that it's cheaper to walk away and re-buy the same or a better property in a year or two for half the amount. They don't care.
Many of the working and middle class who bought houses were sold on the idea that they could afford them and given junk loans. This fueled the housing crisis. Many of them are one or two paychecks from foreclosure. Not all are irresponsible; we can blame their lenders who could've cared less about Grandma's common sense in their immoral pursuit of profit.
It is for those who may end up living in cars that I reprinted this article.