This is sooooo funny ... okay, maybe it isn't something *everyone* can understand, but it's not exactly the kind of thing limited to industry inside-insiders. I can post definitions for whatever somebody doesn't get, if you want, but for now, just sing this to the tune of Don McLean's "American Pie" ...
The Day the Sub-Prime Died
A long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How that yield spread used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
All those mo-fos I could finance
And I could pay my bills off for a while
But then September made me shiver
With every good faith I'd deliver
Bad news on my e-mail
I just lost one more sale
I can't remember if I cried
When I saw the Fremont start to slide
But something touched me deep inside
The day the Sub-Prime died
So bye-bye, B\C money supply
Sent my package to four lenders
But they all asked me "Why?"
And those good old boys were on a crack induced high
Singin', "This'll be the day the loans die ...
This'll be the day the loans die."
Did you write some B\C loans?
Did you blow bucks on an iPhone?
Did that nut Cramer tell you so?
Do you believe in rate control?
Can FHA save your buyer's soul?
Why is underwriting today so damn slow?
Well, I know you'll have to cut those fees
And you're wondering who has moved your cheese
Bernanke's on the news
You can't afford the MBA dues
I was a semi-rich middle-aged broncin' buck
With a lead generator and a lot of pluck
But I knew I was out of luck
The day the Sub-Prime died
So bye-bye, B\C money supply
Sent my package to four lenders
But they all asked me "Why?"
And those good old boys were on a crack induced high
Singin', "This'll be the day the loans die."
Friday, December 7, 2007
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Less Than Zero
So I get this email yesterday:
-----Original Message-----
From: Senator Jim Inhofe inhofe@jiminhofe.com
To: UNDISCLOSED-RECIPIENT
Sent: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 9:56 am
Subject: I'm proud of my zeros.
Dear Friend,
Zero?!!
If I had come home from school with a zero on my report card, my mother would have been none too pleased! But these days I'm proud of my zeroes and other low scores.
That's because they aren't school grades, they're congressional vote ratings from various liberal special interest groups.
I think you'll agree getting a zero is a good grade... I've received zeroes from these ultra-liberal groups and others:
NARAL Pro-Choice America
the National Education Association
the American Immigration Lawyers Association
the Human Rights Campaign
Planned Parenthood
Of course, the opposite is also true. These are the scores that would have put a big smile on my mother's face...perfect scores of 100 from, among others:
the American Conservative Union
the National Right to Life Committee
the Christian Coalition
the American Security Council
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
the League of Private Property Voters
the National Rifle Association (I got an A+)
Americans for Tax Reform
the Family Research Council
I don't stick my finger into the wind to decide how to vote. I don't look at polls or run "focus groups." I vote on solid, conservative principles: limited government, free enterprise, individual liberty, a strong national defense, and traditional family values.
If you agree with me on these issues, and if you agree a "zero" from these liberal groups is a good thing, please help me keep fighting for you by signing up to volunteer in my reelection campaign today.
Please visit http://tracking.technomania.com/cgi-bin/track.cgi?11-11448-205099-49015 to learn more and to join as the newest member of Team Inhofe. We need to build the biggest and best grassroots team to win, and I'm counting on your support.
Thank you for taking the time to read this email. If you are no longer interested in receiving contact from my campaign, please feel free to click the unsubscribe link below.
Sincerely,
Jim Inhofe
United States Senator
Paid for by Friends of Jim Inhofe
Well, you guys know me ... here's my reply.
Dear Senator Inhofe,
I appreciate your excitement at getting zeroes from certain groups. However, those are groups that I support either by being a member or by regular donations both of time and of treasure. I therefore don't agree that your zero grades from them are anything about which to be overjoyed.
I'm not sure why you would be ecstatic about getting a zero grade from the National Education Association. Our teachers are some of the hardest-working people in America, and they are in our schools with our children because they truly care about our nation's future (let's face it, they certainly aren't there for the financial rewards). I know several teachers in our school district (Deer Creek, one of the "richest" in the state) who regularly pay from their own pockets for necessary supplies and rewards to promote their charges' thorough comprehension of the subject material. America pays its sports icons more in a year than most teachers will make in a lifetime; isn't there something wrong with that? Our educators struggle with decreasing budgets to meet increasing test-score requirements, and yet you cheer at the NEA saying you support them less than nearly everyone else in the Senate.
NARAL promotes a woman's right to choose and have control over her own body; it, along with Planned Parenthood, fosters education with regard to contraceptives and choices, and supports the availability of birth control to women of all social and economic backgrounds. If abortion were not legal in America, hundreds of women would die each year as a result of botched back-alley abortion attempts. Until such time as legislators come up with a way to ensure that men meet the financial responsibilities that accompany parenthood without fail and without delay or subterfuge, criminalizing abortion shouldn't even be a topic of discussion. As long as the termination of an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy is legal, it will be safe. Just because abortion is legal doesn't mean every woman facing an unwanted pregnancy is rushing out to get one; it just means that the choice is available to them. It would not be completely outside the realm of logic to state that men should have no voice in an abortion decision until men are becoming pregnant and facing the choice themselves.
The Human Rights Campaign seeks the establishment and enforcement of equal rights for all Americans without regard to sexual identity or preference. All of us are human, Senator, and we all long to love and be loved. The continued oppression of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans is nothing short of unconscionable; it belongs in the past with oppression based on one's gender and the color of one's skin. Anything less won't do.
I'm sure by now you've determined that while I am one of your constituents, I am not one of your supporters. To be honest, Senator, over the last few years you've made rather vocal pronouncements that have made me cringe. The Republican Party is not what it was under Lincoln, sir, and America is dangerously off-course, due in large part to the GOP's "compassionate conservatives" who are certainly the latter but not at all the former. Surely the Christian Coalition is aware of the Commandment that Jesus proclaimed as the highest: "Love thy neighbor." For you to receive failing marks from the nation's educators, advocates of those who would become Americans, and a group seeking to ensure that everyone is free from oppression doesn't speak terribly well of you and suggests that you pay enough lip service to Christian values to get the Christian vote, but that you are ignoring the man for whom the movement is named.
Sincerely,
Donna Sowerby
Oklahoma City, OK
(I got a mailer-daemon ... guess he's not ready to hear from me yet. How very representative of his ilk, though ... "I'll stuff my views up under your nose so you can't help but know them, yet I'm absolutely not interested in what YOU think"!!)
-----Original Message-----
From: Senator Jim Inhofe inhofe@jiminhofe.com
To: UNDISCLOSED-RECIPIENT
Sent: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 9:56 am
Subject: I'm proud of my zeros.
Dear Friend,
Zero?!!
If I had come home from school with a zero on my report card, my mother would have been none too pleased! But these days I'm proud of my zeroes and other low scores.
That's because they aren't school grades, they're congressional vote ratings from various liberal special interest groups.
I think you'll agree getting a zero is a good grade... I've received zeroes from these ultra-liberal groups and others:
NARAL Pro-Choice America
the National Education Association
the American Immigration Lawyers Association
the Human Rights Campaign
Planned Parenthood
Of course, the opposite is also true. These are the scores that would have put a big smile on my mother's face...perfect scores of 100 from, among others:
the American Conservative Union
the National Right to Life Committee
the Christian Coalition
the American Security Council
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
the League of Private Property Voters
the National Rifle Association (I got an A+)
Americans for Tax Reform
the Family Research Council
I don't stick my finger into the wind to decide how to vote. I don't look at polls or run "focus groups." I vote on solid, conservative principles: limited government, free enterprise, individual liberty, a strong national defense, and traditional family values.
If you agree with me on these issues, and if you agree a "zero" from these liberal groups is a good thing, please help me keep fighting for you by signing up to volunteer in my reelection campaign today.
Please visit http://tracking.technomania.com/cgi-bin/track.cgi?11-11448-205099-49015 to learn more and to join as the newest member of Team Inhofe. We need to build the biggest and best grassroots team to win, and I'm counting on your support.
Thank you for taking the time to read this email. If you are no longer interested in receiving contact from my campaign, please feel free to click the unsubscribe link below.
Sincerely,
Jim Inhofe
United States Senator
Paid for by Friends of Jim Inhofe
Well, you guys know me ... here's my reply.
Dear Senator Inhofe,
I appreciate your excitement at getting zeroes from certain groups. However, those are groups that I support either by being a member or by regular donations both of time and of treasure. I therefore don't agree that your zero grades from them are anything about which to be overjoyed.
I'm not sure why you would be ecstatic about getting a zero grade from the National Education Association. Our teachers are some of the hardest-working people in America, and they are in our schools with our children because they truly care about our nation's future (let's face it, they certainly aren't there for the financial rewards). I know several teachers in our school district (Deer Creek, one of the "richest" in the state) who regularly pay from their own pockets for necessary supplies and rewards to promote their charges' thorough comprehension of the subject material. America pays its sports icons more in a year than most teachers will make in a lifetime; isn't there something wrong with that? Our educators struggle with decreasing budgets to meet increasing test-score requirements, and yet you cheer at the NEA saying you support them less than nearly everyone else in the Senate.
NARAL promotes a woman's right to choose and have control over her own body; it, along with Planned Parenthood, fosters education with regard to contraceptives and choices, and supports the availability of birth control to women of all social and economic backgrounds. If abortion were not legal in America, hundreds of women would die each year as a result of botched back-alley abortion attempts. Until such time as legislators come up with a way to ensure that men meet the financial responsibilities that accompany parenthood without fail and without delay or subterfuge, criminalizing abortion shouldn't even be a topic of discussion. As long as the termination of an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy is legal, it will be safe. Just because abortion is legal doesn't mean every woman facing an unwanted pregnancy is rushing out to get one; it just means that the choice is available to them. It would not be completely outside the realm of logic to state that men should have no voice in an abortion decision until men are becoming pregnant and facing the choice themselves.
The Human Rights Campaign seeks the establishment and enforcement of equal rights for all Americans without regard to sexual identity or preference. All of us are human, Senator, and we all long to love and be loved. The continued oppression of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans is nothing short of unconscionable; it belongs in the past with oppression based on one's gender and the color of one's skin. Anything less won't do.
I'm sure by now you've determined that while I am one of your constituents, I am not one of your supporters. To be honest, Senator, over the last few years you've made rather vocal pronouncements that have made me cringe. The Republican Party is not what it was under Lincoln, sir, and America is dangerously off-course, due in large part to the GOP's "compassionate conservatives" who are certainly the latter but not at all the former. Surely the Christian Coalition is aware of the Commandment that Jesus proclaimed as the highest: "Love thy neighbor." For you to receive failing marks from the nation's educators, advocates of those who would become Americans, and a group seeking to ensure that everyone is free from oppression doesn't speak terribly well of you and suggests that you pay enough lip service to Christian values to get the Christian vote, but that you are ignoring the man for whom the movement is named.
Sincerely,
Donna Sowerby
Oklahoma City, OK
(I got a mailer-daemon ... guess he's not ready to hear from me yet. How very representative of his ilk, though ... "I'll stuff my views up under your nose so you can't help but know them, yet I'm absolutely not interested in what YOU think"!!)
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Christmas Before Thanksgiving ... Argh!
Usually, I'm the kind of girl that gets downright narky when I walk into a store before Thanksgiving and see Christmas stuff on display and for sale (unless it's a place like Hobby Lobby, and then I understand that some people make gifts, so there it's okay). Today, however, after the children got home from school, Mark and I were facing the question that plagues so many families ... "What do you want to do?" "I don't know, what do YOU want to do?"
This kind of discussion can go anywhere ... but on this occasion, it ended at Home Depot. A weird place to end? Sometimes, sure, but not this time. My brilliant idea was to go look for a new Christmas tree. The one we've had since our first Christmas in this house is 12 feet tall and is a major pain in the posterior to put up, light up, decorate, and take down ... as a result, there have been more years than not when we've just left it up all year. Back in May when it finally got stuffed back into its boxes and shoved back into the storage shed, we made a shaky sort of agreement that maybe this year we'd get a new one that wasn't such a hassle.
A review of a few websites showed that none of the artificial trees available this year in the usual places really grabbed us. Mark was bemoaning the lack of any truly outstanding choices, when I said (totally without thinking, as is my wont) that the only real alternative (besides not having a tree at all, which is NOT an option when you have three children) was a *real* tree. Mark's face lit up like -- well, like a Christmas tree, and he said that would be just the thing. We'd do it this year, and if it proved more of a bummer than not, we'd buy a new artificial one next year.
The children, of course, were all in favor. I haven't had a live Christmas tree since I was a wee lass, and I had only vague memories of going with Daddy to find one that was more Christmas-y than Charlie Brown-esque, so after a telephone consultation with Mom, I rang the local Coit's Root Beer place. They always had a stand at NW Expressway and Meridian, although I couldn't remember seeing it there in recent years (perhaps because I wasn't really looking for it). The nice lady that answered the phone told me they'd start selling them on Friday ... but damitol, I'm an instant-gratification American, and I wanted it TODAY! Mark popped up a search and found that Home Depot sells real trees, so I rang them and found that yes, they had some available for purchase as soon as we could get there.
We got a really nice Douglas fir, six feet seven inches tall (the guys measured it to make sure it would be okay tied to the top of the big blue Expedition on the way home). We popped in to Target and bought some new lights and a new star for the top, and here is the result ...
It smelled so delicious, and looked so lovely (even though it shed about a pound of needles between the door and its spot in the living room ... note to self: buy a new dustbuster) that I decided to bring out The Bald Santas.
This kind of discussion can go anywhere ... but on this occasion, it ended at Home Depot. A weird place to end? Sometimes, sure, but not this time. My brilliant idea was to go look for a new Christmas tree. The one we've had since our first Christmas in this house is 12 feet tall and is a major pain in the posterior to put up, light up, decorate, and take down ... as a result, there have been more years than not when we've just left it up all year. Back in May when it finally got stuffed back into its boxes and shoved back into the storage shed, we made a shaky sort of agreement that maybe this year we'd get a new one that wasn't such a hassle.
A review of a few websites showed that none of the artificial trees available this year in the usual places really grabbed us. Mark was bemoaning the lack of any truly outstanding choices, when I said (totally without thinking, as is my wont) that the only real alternative (besides not having a tree at all, which is NOT an option when you have three children) was a *real* tree. Mark's face lit up like -- well, like a Christmas tree, and he said that would be just the thing. We'd do it this year, and if it proved more of a bummer than not, we'd buy a new artificial one next year.
The children, of course, were all in favor. I haven't had a live Christmas tree since I was a wee lass, and I had only vague memories of going with Daddy to find one that was more Christmas-y than Charlie Brown-esque, so after a telephone consultation with Mom, I rang the local Coit's Root Beer place. They always had a stand at NW Expressway and Meridian, although I couldn't remember seeing it there in recent years (perhaps because I wasn't really looking for it). The nice lady that answered the phone told me they'd start selling them on Friday ... but damitol, I'm an instant-gratification American, and I wanted it TODAY! Mark popped up a search and found that Home Depot sells real trees, so I rang them and found that yes, they had some available for purchase as soon as we could get there.
We got a really nice Douglas fir, six feet seven inches tall (the guys measured it to make sure it would be okay tied to the top of the big blue Expedition on the way home). We popped in to Target and bought some new lights and a new star for the top, and here is the result ...
It smelled so delicious, and looked so lovely (even though it shed about a pound of needles between the door and its spot in the living room ... note to self: buy a new dustbuster) that I decided to bring out The Bald Santas.
The Bald Santas are So Very Special to me, it may be difficult for me to explain.
My maternal grandfather (Thomas Emmett McGee, jr. ... but forever known to his grandchildren as Ho-De-Ho) was bald, and loved Christmas. He died in February 1978. At some point, my grandmother began collecting bald Santa figures, because they made her think of Ho-De-Ho. She would get them out every Christmas, and we little darlings were admonished not to touch them lest they be irreparably harmed (and while I couldn't swear in court that we never laid a finger on any of them, I don't believe any of them ever came to an unnatural or untimely end at our hands). When I got older (notice I didn't say "grew up" ... *g*), I bought a few for her at Christmas time, but they're very difficult to find, so there weren't many. When she gave up her apartment in the senior community where she lives and moved into the assisted living wing, she couldn't take all of the stuff she'd kept with her after selling her house. I am the lucky one to have inherited The Bald Santas, because in her words, I was the only one who seemed to care about them. I've not brought them out since receiving them, because I would be the one admonishing my little angels not to touch them lest they be irreparably harmed, but tonight I felt like it would be okay. I fetched the bags from where they were stored, and began to tell my children about our Ho-De-Ho and why we have The Bald Santas. Tears began rolling down my face (as they're doing again now), and I hoped my Ho-De-Ho could see that the family tradition is being continued.
So ... Wednesday morning is work, Wednesday afternoon is shopping and a bit of preliminary cooking, Wednesday evening is a bit more work, and Wednesday night is tree decorating. We've got friends and family coming over for Thanksgiving dinner, and while we've had people over for the last couple of years for the event, for some reason this is the first time I'm really looking forward to it.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Opting Out
So the other day I open an email from someone that I like a lot ... let's call her Lola, just to keep her nice and anonymous (and because I don't know anybody named Lola, and because it's one of the best Kinks songs ever). Lola's the kind of girl whose convictions go very deep. She and I have an agreement not to discuss sports (she's a Sooner, I'm a Cowboy), politics (she's a Republican, I'm a Democrat), or religion (she's an evangelical fundamentalist, and I'm ... not). Our children play happily together -- indeed, we've known each other since before any of them were born -- and everything's good in the neighborhood.
OR IS IT??
Like all the rest of us who have email inboxes, Lola gets emails from time to time that she shares with other people. Sometimes she sends them to me, and that's where this story starts.
During the 2004 presidential election, Lola sent out a mass email that had a rather indignant tone; it seems that one candidate's wife had the temerity to say that the other candidate's wife hadn't ever held an RJ (that's Real Job for ye uninitiated). Lola took umbrage with this for a wide variety of reasons. However, there was more to it that I thought Lola must not have heard yet, and I wanted to draw her attention to it. In my job, I must tell several people the same thing at the same time, so I'm prone to click "reply all" and then go about the telling ... and that's what I did this time, too. Lola and I went back and forth for a little while, and then it seems that someone on Lola's mailing list decided they didn't need to be privy to our squabble. Lola then emailed me and told me to stop sending mail to everyone on "her" list, because they were getting irritated. I sent out a quick apology to the list in question, and ceased and desisted.
Flash forward a bit to spring 2006, and here's Lola sending out another mass email with yet another subject that I found narrowly construed. I composed an epic and once again clicked "reply all" ... equal time, right? Wrong! Lola sent another email, incredibly huffy in nature and tone, telling me that I was spamming her friends and that I should stop immediately. (I did ponder the thought that she'd spammed me first, but only briefly.) I mentioned that if her friends were that important to her, she'd either use the blind-copy feature for the outgoing email or leave me off the list.
Everything was hunky-dory for a while, and then last week, another mass email appears from Lola. Did she blind-copy everyone? No! Not wanting to engage in a war of words at a time when work and children and life in general have me quite busy, I sent back an email asking her to PLEASE either blind-copy everyone or just stop sending me emails of this nature! The email in question was a forward of some drivel that allegedly came out of Ben Stein on some Sunday morning talking-head show ... and it wasn't that said drivel is something that mutates and morphs from being mostly real to containing only shreds of truth, it was that I'd held up my end of the bargain by NOT hitting "reply all" but Lola couldn't hold up hers by not sending me this crap (or at least not sending me all her friends' email addresses in the bargain).
The email that started this round was a variation of the one you can find here: http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/benstein2.asp
Lola emailed back:
"fine - I'm not sure I understand what you're objecting to though. I am confused that you seem to think our Chrisitan views are different - all Christians believe the same thing I thought. You do still believe don't you? Just asking cause I love you."
ARGH. I couldn't take it any more. Here is my reply:
I hope I can put this in a way that won't come across as offensive, but I'll give it a try, with apologies in advance in case I fail miserably!
I object to the idea that the whole world is against Christianity. It isn't. What it's against is the persecution of any one faith or creed. Nobody likes to be bullied or shouted down or made to feel as though their beliefs aren't valid just because they're different from yours.
I object to the notion that pop culture has replaced basic morality for everyone who doesn't go to church and/or wear their faith on their sleeve. It hasn't. What it has done is given people a common point of experience, and I think the writer of the original email objects to "Nick and Jessica" (which in and of itself should tell you how bloody old it is) and secular humanism replacing sectarianism.
I object to an email that says that atheism is being shoved down our collective national throat because the Constitution says it should be so. It doesn't. It also doesn't say that Christians get to shove their religion down the throats of anyone who isn't possessed of their same system of beliefs.
I object to claims that aren't true (Dr. Spock had two sons, both of whom are still alive and kicking) but get passed all around anyhow because they're about God and someone might think we're awful if we *don't* send them along.
All Christians do have one basic similar belief, that being the belief that Jesus Christ was the son of God and the promised Messiah. Beyond that, all bets are pretty much off, aren't they? Baptism is done when you're a baby, unless you have to wait until you're old enough to confess with your own tongue, and it's done by sprinkling water on your forehead, unless you have to be dunked all the way under in a huge tub of water. Communion is an imitation of the Last Supper -- bread to represent the body of Christ (unless it's crackers or wafers) and red wine to represent the blood (unless it's grape juice). Women can be senior ministers (unless they can't), but they can't wear jewelry or make-up and they must wear skirts all the time and they can't cut their hair. Only men must lead the church, and they may not marry (unless they can). That's not even scratching the surface, either. Add in so many different "translations" of the Bible, and it's no wonder people get confused.
What I believe isn't at issue here, and it's truly none of your business anyhow. I don't lie, and I don't cheat, and I don't steal ... in short, I do my best to comply with the notes that Moses allegedly brought down from the mountain (although I must admit to being human and boffing up royally once in a while). Since you asked, though, I'll tell you. I don't go to church because I don't think God made me so stupid as to have to be told what to think. The last few times I've been in a church for a service other than a wedding, christening, or funeral, I was told to dig deep and vote for this one or that one and to shun the other ones because they want to destroy America. I don't believe that, and even if I were so gullible as to fall for it, I don't think it's the pulpit's duty to engage in that sort of coercion. (Yes, it is too coercion, because it implies that if I don't do as I'm told by that human being up there, I'm on the fast-track to hell no matter what else I do.) I take the Bible with a whole cup of salt (maybe it's Lot's wife?) because a bunch of men got together at the Council of Nicaea and decided that this bit of writing will go in, but not that one. (Ever notice there are exactly two books written by women in the Bible? What about the Gnostic Gospels and the Nag Hammadi scrolls? The Apocrypha? What are they, chopped liver?) I also take issue with it because it was mostly retold legend until somebody wrote it down, and it's been translated and "revised" umpteen zillion times until it's watered down and says exactly what some certain bit of "Christianity" wants it to say. And really, how about folks like Oral and Richard Roberts, Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson? Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, Jimmy Swaggart, Jack van Impe? Oh, and my current favorite, Ted "I am not gay and I didn't have sex with a guy and he's lying except for the part where he says I bought meth from him and used it with him" Haggard. What in the world is all that about, anyhow? Send me all your money so I can promote the Lord's work (right after I buy a nice new Rolls Royce and a massive house and a new mink for my wife and pay off the city council and that cute little honey I hung out with at the convention a few years ago) ... yeah, super. What I believe doesn't matter; it's what I *don't* believe that matters.
I don't object to getting email from you, just like you don't object to getting email from me. I know, though, that if I send you something going on about how the conservatives are doing nothing but enriching themselves and their cronies while trashing the environment and killing our sons and daughters in an illegal and unjust war and lying and stealing and cheating and perverting the Constitution (and W *did* say it was a "goddamned piece of paper" ... so put that in your "he's such a wonderful God-fearing man" pipe and smoke it) to pursue and achieve their own selfish ends, you're going to throw a hissy fit of the first order.
It's about RESPECT, my friend, which you seem to only want to receive, although (in your own terms) it is more blessed to give.
Just learn to use the fucking BCC feature, would you? Pretty please? That's all I asked.
Hope you and the family are well ... love you muchly, see you soon!
Love,
Donna
So why am I posting this here? Because I don't think Lola cares enough to bother reading through my reply, that's why. It seems that the right-wing types only want to say their piece and aren't all that fussed about anyone else's views or feelings. If you're sick of people shoving their religion down your throat, perhaps you could use some of these arguments next time you get into it with someone who's determined to convert you. Good luck.
OR IS IT??
Like all the rest of us who have email inboxes, Lola gets emails from time to time that she shares with other people. Sometimes she sends them to me, and that's where this story starts.
During the 2004 presidential election, Lola sent out a mass email that had a rather indignant tone; it seems that one candidate's wife had the temerity to say that the other candidate's wife hadn't ever held an RJ (that's Real Job for ye uninitiated). Lola took umbrage with this for a wide variety of reasons. However, there was more to it that I thought Lola must not have heard yet, and I wanted to draw her attention to it. In my job, I must tell several people the same thing at the same time, so I'm prone to click "reply all" and then go about the telling ... and that's what I did this time, too. Lola and I went back and forth for a little while, and then it seems that someone on Lola's mailing list decided they didn't need to be privy to our squabble. Lola then emailed me and told me to stop sending mail to everyone on "her" list, because they were getting irritated. I sent out a quick apology to the list in question, and ceased and desisted.
Flash forward a bit to spring 2006, and here's Lola sending out another mass email with yet another subject that I found narrowly construed. I composed an epic and once again clicked "reply all" ... equal time, right? Wrong! Lola sent another email, incredibly huffy in nature and tone, telling me that I was spamming her friends and that I should stop immediately. (I did ponder the thought that she'd spammed me first, but only briefly.) I mentioned that if her friends were that important to her, she'd either use the blind-copy feature for the outgoing email or leave me off the list.
Everything was hunky-dory for a while, and then last week, another mass email appears from Lola. Did she blind-copy everyone? No! Not wanting to engage in a war of words at a time when work and children and life in general have me quite busy, I sent back an email asking her to PLEASE either blind-copy everyone or just stop sending me emails of this nature! The email in question was a forward of some drivel that allegedly came out of Ben Stein on some Sunday morning talking-head show ... and it wasn't that said drivel is something that mutates and morphs from being mostly real to containing only shreds of truth, it was that I'd held up my end of the bargain by NOT hitting "reply all" but Lola couldn't hold up hers by not sending me this crap (or at least not sending me all her friends' email addresses in the bargain).
The email that started this round was a variation of the one you can find here: http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/benstein2.asp
Lola emailed back:
"fine - I'm not sure I understand what you're objecting to though. I am confused that you seem to think our Chrisitan views are different - all Christians believe the same thing I thought. You do still believe don't you? Just asking cause I love you."
ARGH. I couldn't take it any more. Here is my reply:
I hope I can put this in a way that won't come across as offensive, but I'll give it a try, with apologies in advance in case I fail miserably!
I object to the idea that the whole world is against Christianity. It isn't. What it's against is the persecution of any one faith or creed. Nobody likes to be bullied or shouted down or made to feel as though their beliefs aren't valid just because they're different from yours.
I object to the notion that pop culture has replaced basic morality for everyone who doesn't go to church and/or wear their faith on their sleeve. It hasn't. What it has done is given people a common point of experience, and I think the writer of the original email objects to "Nick and Jessica" (which in and of itself should tell you how bloody old it is) and secular humanism replacing sectarianism.
I object to an email that says that atheism is being shoved down our collective national throat because the Constitution says it should be so. It doesn't. It also doesn't say that Christians get to shove their religion down the throats of anyone who isn't possessed of their same system of beliefs.
I object to claims that aren't true (Dr. Spock had two sons, both of whom are still alive and kicking) but get passed all around anyhow because they're about God and someone might think we're awful if we *don't* send them along.
All Christians do have one basic similar belief, that being the belief that Jesus Christ was the son of God and the promised Messiah. Beyond that, all bets are pretty much off, aren't they? Baptism is done when you're a baby, unless you have to wait until you're old enough to confess with your own tongue, and it's done by sprinkling water on your forehead, unless you have to be dunked all the way under in a huge tub of water. Communion is an imitation of the Last Supper -- bread to represent the body of Christ (unless it's crackers or wafers) and red wine to represent the blood (unless it's grape juice). Women can be senior ministers (unless they can't), but they can't wear jewelry or make-up and they must wear skirts all the time and they can't cut their hair. Only men must lead the church, and they may not marry (unless they can). That's not even scratching the surface, either. Add in so many different "translations" of the Bible, and it's no wonder people get confused.
What I believe isn't at issue here, and it's truly none of your business anyhow. I don't lie, and I don't cheat, and I don't steal ... in short, I do my best to comply with the notes that Moses allegedly brought down from the mountain (although I must admit to being human and boffing up royally once in a while). Since you asked, though, I'll tell you. I don't go to church because I don't think God made me so stupid as to have to be told what to think. The last few times I've been in a church for a service other than a wedding, christening, or funeral, I was told to dig deep and vote for this one or that one and to shun the other ones because they want to destroy America. I don't believe that, and even if I were so gullible as to fall for it, I don't think it's the pulpit's duty to engage in that sort of coercion. (Yes, it is too coercion, because it implies that if I don't do as I'm told by that human being up there, I'm on the fast-track to hell no matter what else I do.) I take the Bible with a whole cup of salt (maybe it's Lot's wife?) because a bunch of men got together at the Council of Nicaea and decided that this bit of writing will go in, but not that one. (Ever notice there are exactly two books written by women in the Bible? What about the Gnostic Gospels and the Nag Hammadi scrolls? The Apocrypha? What are they, chopped liver?) I also take issue with it because it was mostly retold legend until somebody wrote it down, and it's been translated and "revised" umpteen zillion times until it's watered down and says exactly what some certain bit of "Christianity" wants it to say. And really, how about folks like Oral and Richard Roberts, Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson? Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, Jimmy Swaggart, Jack van Impe? Oh, and my current favorite, Ted "I am not gay and I didn't have sex with a guy and he's lying except for the part where he says I bought meth from him and used it with him" Haggard. What in the world is all that about, anyhow? Send me all your money so I can promote the Lord's work (right after I buy a nice new Rolls Royce and a massive house and a new mink for my wife and pay off the city council and that cute little honey I hung out with at the convention a few years ago) ... yeah, super. What I believe doesn't matter; it's what I *don't* believe that matters.
I don't object to getting email from you, just like you don't object to getting email from me. I know, though, that if I send you something going on about how the conservatives are doing nothing but enriching themselves and their cronies while trashing the environment and killing our sons and daughters in an illegal and unjust war and lying and stealing and cheating and perverting the Constitution (and W *did* say it was a "goddamned piece of paper" ... so put that in your "he's such a wonderful God-fearing man" pipe and smoke it) to pursue and achieve their own selfish ends, you're going to throw a hissy fit of the first order.
It's about RESPECT, my friend, which you seem to only want to receive, although (in your own terms) it is more blessed to give.
Just learn to use the fucking BCC feature, would you? Pretty please? That's all I asked.
Hope you and the family are well ... love you muchly, see you soon!
Love,
Donna
So why am I posting this here? Because I don't think Lola cares enough to bother reading through my reply, that's why. It seems that the right-wing types only want to say their piece and aren't all that fussed about anyone else's views or feelings. If you're sick of people shoving their religion down your throat, perhaps you could use some of these arguments next time you get into it with someone who's determined to convert you. Good luck.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
On Running Oneself Ragged
Twenty-four hours ... one thousand four hundred forty minutes ... eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds. That's all any of us has in a day. What we do in that time is up to us (well, to an extent). Cram in as much as you like, use a shoehorn if necessary; just make sure that what you do is done well and with your whole heart. Otherwise, what's the point?
Lately I've been stacking up commitments left, right, and sideways. For instance, son Kieran is now a Tiger Cub Scout ... which requires an "adult partner" ... which is, of course, me. (Oh, and I'm one of the den leaders, too.)
Daughter Kendall sooooo enjoys her ballet classes! She's quite the little performer, and she seeks to "make an impact" on people around her whether she's onstage or off. (I'm not totally convinced that she doesn't go through it all just for the flowers, though!)
And so where's the "me" time, you ask? Well, let's think that one through. I have the Realtor thing going on, which requires that I physically go and show houses, write contracts, facilitate inspections, attend closings, and such like that. I do the mortgage goddess dance too, in which a lot can be accomplished by phone, but I must meet up with clients at least twice in most cases (that's once to sign application documents and once at closing). On Mondays we have Kendall's ballet right after school and Cub Scouts of an evening, with supper shoved down somewhere in between. Weekdays during normal business hours, I'm expected to answer the phones and get loans done; weekdays after hours and weekends I'm supposed to be showing properties or holding open houses or something of that nature. Add in the June Cleaver stuff (cooking, cleaning, and laundry - not that I do any of those things with any sort of regularity), and I have to schedule things like eating and sleeping. (Thank goodness I can breathe while doing other stuff!)
Yes, I am busy beyond belief most of the time. Yes, I collapse every night and mentally chastise myself for things that I meant to do/should have done during that day but didn't. Yes, I fret about not exercising enough and not cooking for my family and not doing so many "typical mommy" things. It's all for the greater good, though (thanks, Grindelwald), or at least that's the line I use to pacify myself about it. I guess I'm trapped in a "if I don't do it, who will?" mentality. (I don't really know where it came from, but origin is less important than facility at this point.)
I am less concerned with having time for myself (usually) than I am about making sure that my children have what they need, looking after my clients, and just generally taking care of the world in general. One day (too soon, I hear), the children will be grown and gone with families of their own, and I'll get to retire (totally preferable to the "die with your boots on" scenario that I'm more likely to wind up with). I'll have "me time" then, won't I?
Hmm. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? Are there guarantees that I'll wake up in the morning, come back in one piece from that trip to the grocery store, survive the walk out to the mailbox?
Guess I'll go book a spa day!
Lately I've been stacking up commitments left, right, and sideways. For instance, son Kieran is now a Tiger Cub Scout ... which requires an "adult partner" ... which is, of course, me. (Oh, and I'm one of the den leaders, too.)
Daughter Kendall sooooo enjoys her ballet classes! She's quite the little performer, and she seeks to "make an impact" on people around her whether she's onstage or off. (I'm not totally convinced that she doesn't go through it all just for the flowers, though!)
And so where's the "me" time, you ask? Well, let's think that one through. I have the Realtor thing going on, which requires that I physically go and show houses, write contracts, facilitate inspections, attend closings, and such like that. I do the mortgage goddess dance too, in which a lot can be accomplished by phone, but I must meet up with clients at least twice in most cases (that's once to sign application documents and once at closing). On Mondays we have Kendall's ballet right after school and Cub Scouts of an evening, with supper shoved down somewhere in between. Weekdays during normal business hours, I'm expected to answer the phones and get loans done; weekdays after hours and weekends I'm supposed to be showing properties or holding open houses or something of that nature. Add in the June Cleaver stuff (cooking, cleaning, and laundry - not that I do any of those things with any sort of regularity), and I have to schedule things like eating and sleeping. (Thank goodness I can breathe while doing other stuff!)
Yes, I am busy beyond belief most of the time. Yes, I collapse every night and mentally chastise myself for things that I meant to do/should have done during that day but didn't. Yes, I fret about not exercising enough and not cooking for my family and not doing so many "typical mommy" things. It's all for the greater good, though (thanks, Grindelwald), or at least that's the line I use to pacify myself about it. I guess I'm trapped in a "if I don't do it, who will?" mentality. (I don't really know where it came from, but origin is less important than facility at this point.)
I am less concerned with having time for myself (usually) than I am about making sure that my children have what they need, looking after my clients, and just generally taking care of the world in general. One day (too soon, I hear), the children will be grown and gone with families of their own, and I'll get to retire (totally preferable to the "die with your boots on" scenario that I'm more likely to wind up with). I'll have "me time" then, won't I?
Hmm. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? Are there guarantees that I'll wake up in the morning, come back in one piece from that trip to the grocery store, survive the walk out to the mailbox?
Guess I'll go book a spa day!
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Crash Goes The Mortgage Market
From the email inbox this week:
"Hi Donna,
Well, I've been hearing all the scare stories on the news and from my investment firm about the terrible situation in the mortgage industry these days. I know you have a better handle on it than probably most of the talking heads. Do you think there is going to be a problem with me getting a mortgage? I'm really sick of all the stories about banks backing out of mortgages at the last minute already! What is your experience these days? Of course I am nervous with having already put down a sizable deposit toward the house!
Thanks for any words of wisdom."
You would not BELIEVE how many emails like this I've had this week ... one client even emailed asking, "Am I going to lose my house?" (My reply, for the record, was, "As long as you're making the payments on time, no!")
You'd better grab a cup of tea or coffee or Jack and Coke or something ... this is going to take a minute! : )
People are always going to buy houses, and people are always going to refinance the houses they've got for one reason or another. The mortgage market isn't going to disappear. The feds are being rather myopic (IMHO) about it all, because if we flew airplanes or built cars, they'd be falling all over themselves to bail us out (but we don't, so they aren't).
What's going on now is essentially a crisis of confidence, but on an incredibly massive scale. Let's say that your asset portfolio includes a few accounts with a local brokerage -- your friendly neighborhood Waddell & Reed office, maybe (since I have a client who's a W&D broker, ha), a guy called Jim. You and Jim sat down and plotted your long-term goals and a strategy to reach them. The strategy included buying some mortgage-backed securities (MBS), because everybody knows that they're one of the most stable investment vehicles around -- after all, wouldn't you do pretty much anything to avoid foreclosure? Sure you would, and so would everybody else, which is what makes MBS so attractive. So you tell Jim to purchase MBS bits with a certain percentage of your portfolio amount, and to keep that amount level with each contribution you make to the account. Life is good!
One day you're listening to the news while puttering around doing something else, and you hear that there are a record number of foreclosures going on all around the nation just now. You think to yourself, "What? How can that be? And hey -- I'd better call Jim and tell him not to buy any more MBS for me." So you ring Jim, and you tell him, and he says okay. A couple of weeks later, you're watching the late news before bed, and you start hearing how subprime mortgages are total crap, and how they're horribly risky and it's some talking head's opinion that they should never have been available to anyone ever. The talking head goes on to say that subprime loans and loans with little or no income or asset verification (we call them stated-income or no-doc loans) are going to be the things that crash the whole mortgage market. "Oh, no," you think to yourself, "I've got to call Jim NOW and tell him to get rid of all the MBS in my portfolio!" So even though it's late, you hit Jim's beeper, and when he calls back you tell him that first thing in the morning, he's got to get rid of ALL the MBS you've got, so he does.
Now ... take you ... and multiply it by about 30 million individual investors, loads of life insurance and annuity companies, and a boatload of pension funds ... and see where the trouble comes from? You heard someone say something about something, and that initially set off a little bell that says okay, we won't buy any more of those ... then later you hear something more about it, and that sparks a panic in you to get rid of them before they do so much irreparable damage to your retirement and investment funds that you'll wind up living in a refrigerator box under an interstate bridge.
The scariest part of it is that this is eerily similar to the lack of confidence that led from the stock market crash of 1929 to a run on the local banks and then to the Great Depression. The biggest difference between then and now is that we have CNN, MSNBC, BloombergTV, and the World Wide Web to make sure that the hysteria can spread far and fast.
The truth of it all is that there ARE more foreclosures going on this year, and it IS a record number. However, what the talking heads aren't saying is that it's nearly the very same percentage of all outstanding home loans that's been foreclosed on every year for a long time. Look at it this way: if there are 100 mortgages made every year, and 5 of them go into foreclosure the next year, there is a 5% foreclosure rate. If there are 1000 mortgages made in any given year (a new record number!), and 50 of them go into foreclosure the year after that (also a new record number!), then yes, there are 10 times more foreclosures than there were last year ... OMG, eek, the sky is falling! Oh, but wait ... it's still a 5% foreclosure rate.
The fact is that the mortgage rates have been so low for so long that there are far more loans out there to be foreclosed. Since real estate prices have been up as well, mortgage loan amounts have gone up proportionately, which leads to a higher dollar figure in foreclosure than ever before. It's simply statistics, but Joe Average only knows what he heard from Peter Jennings -- that there are ten times more foreclosures this year -- and has the knee-jerk reaction that you had when you heard, resulting in your calls to Jim to get your butt out of those MBS right the hell now.
So why are so many mortgage companies going under? Why did Countrywide have to draw down $11.5 billion in credit lines this week? Why did the Federal Reserve bend its own very strict rules for Citibank and Bank of America? It's liquidity ... the ability to continue funding wholesale mortgage origination on a daily basis.
There is an event in Mortgage Land known as pooling, which is where loans are assembled by wholesalers from many different sources, then grouped together by the characteristics of each individual loan (credit score range, loan amount range, fixed or adjustable, loan term, and a bunch of other things) and sold in a pool into Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. You want to understand what happens to a mortgage after the loan is closed in order to grasp the whole enchilada (and it's shredded chicken with ranchera sauce, yum).
Let's say that I'm the First National Bank of Donna, and I have $50 million that my board of directors has set aside to make mortgage loans. I set my retail rates and fees to be competitive with those of the other mortgage lenders around me, and I let people know that I'm ready to make loans. Soon, I'm a busy little mortgage maker, and before too long passes, I've loaned out all $50 million to happy homeowners. So ... now what? It's taken me eighteen months to loan out $50 million, all secured by real estate mortgages with terms varying from ten to thirty years. The local marketplace knows I'm here, and it knows I do a great job, and there are more people who want me to do their mortgages. I can either turn them away, telling them that it'll be ten to fifteen years before I have enough of my $50 million back to make them a loan ... or, I can sell them to someone else. At that point, I look through each file and make sure that it fits the rules that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have set down for notes that they will purchase, group them together by type, then box them up with a note on the top of each box saying what's in it. I can choose whether to continue to take the payments from my borrowers and hold their escrow accounts (known as "servicing retained"), or whether to kiss them off lock, stock, and escrow to someone else (known as "servicing released"). By selling the notes upstream to larger lenders (or in some cases, directly to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac), I am constantly replenishing my $50 million loan proceeds account and making a premium (usually expressed as a percentage of the dollar amount of the loan) for each loan I sell. Ah, capitalism!
Everyone is having a rough time getting the international marketplace to remain jazzed about the American MBS enough to keep buying them. The UK is teetering on the edge of a similar meltdown (we exported our subprime and no-doc ideas to them, and it's jumping up to bite them on the posterior too, although their PM was most recently the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and as such has a clue and took swift and decisive steps to stop it there), which isn't exactly inspiring other nations to think our MBS are so great.
So, then, the short version of an answer to the question above is that if you have good credit (which we define by a credit score of 620 or higher) and easily documented income and assets (meaning that you can produce either pay stubs and W-2s showing what you make and/or tax returns that reflect your actual income and statements from your bank or investment firm or 401K in the US that indicate what you've actually got stashed - underwriters aren't typically excited in a good way about offshore accounts or money hidden in the name of a child), then no, you aren't going to have a problem getting a permanent mortgage. The rate may not be as low as what we've had over the last three years, but if you fit into the box that I just described, you're typically not going to have a problem getting a loan for your house (or your car or your boat or your college education or whatever).
The people who are going to have problems in the very near future (like starting last week, ha) are people who have some or all of these factors: low credit scores, high debt ratio, derogatory credit information (even if it's too old to impact the score), difficulty proving income and/or assets, and little or no assets in reserve after closing. There will always be FHA and VA loans, too, since they were created by an act of Congress. It's just that for certain chunks of society at large, getting credit is going to become rather difficult and it's going to stay that way for a while, maybe forever. At least it'll stop (or seriously curtail) this tendency we've had lately as a nation toward buying beyond our means. Homebuilders may not like it, but I really don't think it'll wind up being a bad thing.
Oh, and I haven't heard about any lenders backing out of things at the last minute. Lots of investors are performing major surgery on a lot of programs -- or suspending them altogether for the time being -- but most of them are doing that in response to their funding sources telling them they have to in order to continue having any funding liquidity at all. The only lenders that I know of who are "backing out" are ones who are slamming shut, and you can't really expect a loan to be funded by an entity that isn't there anymore. This has happened a couple of times in the last several weeks (although thankfully not to any of the files that I've got going), and the biggest end result of it so far is that the lenders who are still there are getting backed up with submissions being transferred to them to take up the slack. In the main it's a matter of more time spent waiting for underwriting attention, because suddenly the 25,000 files that were at XYZ have to go to ABC, DEF, GHI, JKL, and MNO, who were humming happily along but now have to accommodate an additional 5,000 files apiece.
One further note: Just because a lender goes under doesn't mean that anything awful is going to happen to a home loan that you've already got. The promissory note that you signed at closing binds the lender as much as it binds you, but it also binds that lender's "successors and/or assigns, as their interests may appear" (which is what shows up on your homeowner's insurance declarations page in the mortgagee clause, so if you've ever wondered what ISAOA/ATIMA means, there's your answer). If your loan payments include monthly escrows, you don't need to worry that those funds are going to be lost, because escrow accounts are federally protected and can't be seized by creditors or anything like that. Your servicing will transfer to another entity, but they have to keep to the note. Whatever your loan amount, interest rate, and maturity date were on the date you signed will stay the same. All that can change are your loan number, the name of the lender to whom you write the check, and the address to which you send that payment (or the website where you pay online). CAVEAT: If you've got an automatic draft set up, then you will most likely have to set it up again with the new servicing entity, because the banking system doesn't allow that sort of payment method to transfer without an overt act on your part.
Hope this helps; sorry it's such a book. Don't be shy about asking questions if you have them! If I don't know the answer, I'll find it for you.
"Hi Donna,
Well, I've been hearing all the scare stories on the news and from my investment firm about the terrible situation in the mortgage industry these days. I know you have a better handle on it than probably most of the talking heads. Do you think there is going to be a problem with me getting a mortgage? I'm really sick of all the stories about banks backing out of mortgages at the last minute already! What is your experience these days? Of course I am nervous with having already put down a sizable deposit toward the house!
Thanks for any words of wisdom."
You would not BELIEVE how many emails like this I've had this week ... one client even emailed asking, "Am I going to lose my house?" (My reply, for the record, was, "As long as you're making the payments on time, no!")
You'd better grab a cup of tea or coffee or Jack and Coke or something ... this is going to take a minute! : )
People are always going to buy houses, and people are always going to refinance the houses they've got for one reason or another. The mortgage market isn't going to disappear. The feds are being rather myopic (IMHO) about it all, because if we flew airplanes or built cars, they'd be falling all over themselves to bail us out (but we don't, so they aren't).
What's going on now is essentially a crisis of confidence, but on an incredibly massive scale. Let's say that your asset portfolio includes a few accounts with a local brokerage -- your friendly neighborhood Waddell & Reed office, maybe (since I have a client who's a W&D broker, ha), a guy called Jim. You and Jim sat down and plotted your long-term goals and a strategy to reach them. The strategy included buying some mortgage-backed securities (MBS), because everybody knows that they're one of the most stable investment vehicles around -- after all, wouldn't you do pretty much anything to avoid foreclosure? Sure you would, and so would everybody else, which is what makes MBS so attractive. So you tell Jim to purchase MBS bits with a certain percentage of your portfolio amount, and to keep that amount level with each contribution you make to the account. Life is good!
One day you're listening to the news while puttering around doing something else, and you hear that there are a record number of foreclosures going on all around the nation just now. You think to yourself, "What? How can that be? And hey -- I'd better call Jim and tell him not to buy any more MBS for me." So you ring Jim, and you tell him, and he says okay. A couple of weeks later, you're watching the late news before bed, and you start hearing how subprime mortgages are total crap, and how they're horribly risky and it's some talking head's opinion that they should never have been available to anyone ever. The talking head goes on to say that subprime loans and loans with little or no income or asset verification (we call them stated-income or no-doc loans) are going to be the things that crash the whole mortgage market. "Oh, no," you think to yourself, "I've got to call Jim NOW and tell him to get rid of all the MBS in my portfolio!" So even though it's late, you hit Jim's beeper, and when he calls back you tell him that first thing in the morning, he's got to get rid of ALL the MBS you've got, so he does.
Now ... take you ... and multiply it by about 30 million individual investors, loads of life insurance and annuity companies, and a boatload of pension funds ... and see where the trouble comes from? You heard someone say something about something, and that initially set off a little bell that says okay, we won't buy any more of those ... then later you hear something more about it, and that sparks a panic in you to get rid of them before they do so much irreparable damage to your retirement and investment funds that you'll wind up living in a refrigerator box under an interstate bridge.
The scariest part of it is that this is eerily similar to the lack of confidence that led from the stock market crash of 1929 to a run on the local banks and then to the Great Depression. The biggest difference between then and now is that we have CNN, MSNBC, BloombergTV, and the World Wide Web to make sure that the hysteria can spread far and fast.
The truth of it all is that there ARE more foreclosures going on this year, and it IS a record number. However, what the talking heads aren't saying is that it's nearly the very same percentage of all outstanding home loans that's been foreclosed on every year for a long time. Look at it this way: if there are 100 mortgages made every year, and 5 of them go into foreclosure the next year, there is a 5% foreclosure rate. If there are 1000 mortgages made in any given year (a new record number!), and 50 of them go into foreclosure the year after that (also a new record number!), then yes, there are 10 times more foreclosures than there were last year ... OMG, eek, the sky is falling! Oh, but wait ... it's still a 5% foreclosure rate.
The fact is that the mortgage rates have been so low for so long that there are far more loans out there to be foreclosed. Since real estate prices have been up as well, mortgage loan amounts have gone up proportionately, which leads to a higher dollar figure in foreclosure than ever before. It's simply statistics, but Joe Average only knows what he heard from Peter Jennings -- that there are ten times more foreclosures this year -- and has the knee-jerk reaction that you had when you heard, resulting in your calls to Jim to get your butt out of those MBS right the hell now.
So why are so many mortgage companies going under? Why did Countrywide have to draw down $11.5 billion in credit lines this week? Why did the Federal Reserve bend its own very strict rules for Citibank and Bank of America? It's liquidity ... the ability to continue funding wholesale mortgage origination on a daily basis.
There is an event in Mortgage Land known as pooling, which is where loans are assembled by wholesalers from many different sources, then grouped together by the characteristics of each individual loan (credit score range, loan amount range, fixed or adjustable, loan term, and a bunch of other things) and sold in a pool into Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. You want to understand what happens to a mortgage after the loan is closed in order to grasp the whole enchilada (and it's shredded chicken with ranchera sauce, yum).
Let's say that I'm the First National Bank of Donna, and I have $50 million that my board of directors has set aside to make mortgage loans. I set my retail rates and fees to be competitive with those of the other mortgage lenders around me, and I let people know that I'm ready to make loans. Soon, I'm a busy little mortgage maker, and before too long passes, I've loaned out all $50 million to happy homeowners. So ... now what? It's taken me eighteen months to loan out $50 million, all secured by real estate mortgages with terms varying from ten to thirty years. The local marketplace knows I'm here, and it knows I do a great job, and there are more people who want me to do their mortgages. I can either turn them away, telling them that it'll be ten to fifteen years before I have enough of my $50 million back to make them a loan ... or, I can sell them to someone else. At that point, I look through each file and make sure that it fits the rules that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have set down for notes that they will purchase, group them together by type, then box them up with a note on the top of each box saying what's in it. I can choose whether to continue to take the payments from my borrowers and hold their escrow accounts (known as "servicing retained"), or whether to kiss them off lock, stock, and escrow to someone else (known as "servicing released"). By selling the notes upstream to larger lenders (or in some cases, directly to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac), I am constantly replenishing my $50 million loan proceeds account and making a premium (usually expressed as a percentage of the dollar amount of the loan) for each loan I sell. Ah, capitalism!
Everyone is having a rough time getting the international marketplace to remain jazzed about the American MBS enough to keep buying them. The UK is teetering on the edge of a similar meltdown (we exported our subprime and no-doc ideas to them, and it's jumping up to bite them on the posterior too, although their PM was most recently the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and as such has a clue and took swift and decisive steps to stop it there), which isn't exactly inspiring other nations to think our MBS are so great.
So, then, the short version of an answer to the question above is that if you have good credit (which we define by a credit score of 620 or higher) and easily documented income and assets (meaning that you can produce either pay stubs and W-2s showing what you make and/or tax returns that reflect your actual income and statements from your bank or investment firm or 401K in the US that indicate what you've actually got stashed - underwriters aren't typically excited in a good way about offshore accounts or money hidden in the name of a child), then no, you aren't going to have a problem getting a permanent mortgage. The rate may not be as low as what we've had over the last three years, but if you fit into the box that I just described, you're typically not going to have a problem getting a loan for your house (or your car or your boat or your college education or whatever).
The people who are going to have problems in the very near future (like starting last week, ha) are people who have some or all of these factors: low credit scores, high debt ratio, derogatory credit information (even if it's too old to impact the score), difficulty proving income and/or assets, and little or no assets in reserve after closing. There will always be FHA and VA loans, too, since they were created by an act of Congress. It's just that for certain chunks of society at large, getting credit is going to become rather difficult and it's going to stay that way for a while, maybe forever. At least it'll stop (or seriously curtail) this tendency we've had lately as a nation toward buying beyond our means. Homebuilders may not like it, but I really don't think it'll wind up being a bad thing.
Oh, and I haven't heard about any lenders backing out of things at the last minute. Lots of investors are performing major surgery on a lot of programs -- or suspending them altogether for the time being -- but most of them are doing that in response to their funding sources telling them they have to in order to continue having any funding liquidity at all. The only lenders that I know of who are "backing out" are ones who are slamming shut, and you can't really expect a loan to be funded by an entity that isn't there anymore. This has happened a couple of times in the last several weeks (although thankfully not to any of the files that I've got going), and the biggest end result of it so far is that the lenders who are still there are getting backed up with submissions being transferred to them to take up the slack. In the main it's a matter of more time spent waiting for underwriting attention, because suddenly the 25,000 files that were at XYZ have to go to ABC, DEF, GHI, JKL, and MNO, who were humming happily along but now have to accommodate an additional 5,000 files apiece.
One further note: Just because a lender goes under doesn't mean that anything awful is going to happen to a home loan that you've already got. The promissory note that you signed at closing binds the lender as much as it binds you, but it also binds that lender's "successors and/or assigns, as their interests may appear" (which is what shows up on your homeowner's insurance declarations page in the mortgagee clause, so if you've ever wondered what ISAOA/ATIMA means, there's your answer). If your loan payments include monthly escrows, you don't need to worry that those funds are going to be lost, because escrow accounts are federally protected and can't be seized by creditors or anything like that. Your servicing will transfer to another entity, but they have to keep to the note. Whatever your loan amount, interest rate, and maturity date were on the date you signed will stay the same. All that can change are your loan number, the name of the lender to whom you write the check, and the address to which you send that payment (or the website where you pay online). CAVEAT: If you've got an automatic draft set up, then you will most likely have to set it up again with the new servicing entity, because the banking system doesn't allow that sort of payment method to transfer without an overt act on your part.
Hope this helps; sorry it's such a book. Don't be shy about asking questions if you have them! If I don't know the answer, I'll find it for you.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Post-Summer Musings
I'm so sorry not to have bored you with musings since June, Fair Reader! This is what I worried would happen when I started this blog (well, one of the things anyhow), but no matter. We're all here together now, aren't we?
Last time we met, I was becoming ever more churlish at the Pollyanna-esque chipperness of Hector the Gate Agent at O'Hare. (We finally did get out of there, landing in Manchester nine hours late ... no word on what befell the other travellers who were using the same plane on subsequent flights.) Since then, we enjoyed England together as a family, Mark and I learned some things about Paris, and we discovered that one should *always* put one's duty-free purchases in one's checked luggage after clearing Customs if one has purchased anything in liquid form and means to carry it to one's final destination (otherwise, one will get home with perhaps less than what one spent $125 on at the duty-free, whether said purchases remain sealed in their duty-free bag with receipt plainly visible or not).
The twins started first grade last week, and K.C. started sixth grade. How are they old enough for that when they were born yesterday and we've had them forever??!! I feel so mortal.
Last time we met, I was becoming ever more churlish at the Pollyanna-esque chipperness of Hector the Gate Agent at O'Hare. (We finally did get out of there, landing in Manchester nine hours late ... no word on what befell the other travellers who were using the same plane on subsequent flights.) Since then, we enjoyed England together as a family, Mark and I learned some things about Paris, and we discovered that one should *always* put one's duty-free purchases in one's checked luggage after clearing Customs if one has purchased anything in liquid form and means to carry it to one's final destination (otherwise, one will get home with perhaps less than what one spent $125 on at the duty-free, whether said purchases remain sealed in their duty-free bag with receipt plainly visible or not).
The twins started first grade last week, and K.C. started sixth grade. How are they old enough for that when they were born yesterday and we've had them forever??!! I feel so mortal.
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