Mortgage foreclosures

Surfing the net brings interesting info to light. A recent Sunday [5 October 2008] interview on America's National Public radio brought this nugget to the surface. NPR's Sunday two hour morning news programme touts a blog for those having difficulty making mortgage payments. This 5 October story is about a young married woman in the murky land of California which is steep in failed mortgages.
Her tale of woe is instructive. She began by saying that she thought that her grandfather's advise on putting away something [money] for a rainy day and living beyond your means, a bit thick. She after all was living in another time, another world, an age of easy money and of plenty. She and her husband had a good college degree; the two were had stepped on the rungs of middle management; they were children of genY. She and her hubby jumped at the idea of buying a home of their own on easy credit terms with almost nothing down. And then the housing bubble kicked him and the variable mortgage rate began climbing, and her monthly payout did too to meet her bills. What were they? Well, to begin with, the mortgage payment, then student loans, then motor gasoline for two gas guzzlers for her and hubby to go to their respective jobs, and of course, food prices kept going up, and then there were the credit card debt which at first helped cushion the burgeoning expenses. She found a second job, and even with 3 salaries, the money was never enough to downsize the ballooning debt. Now here's the kick in the head, the young lady had a degree in FINANCE, yes finance. When asked if she read the terms of her mortgage, she replied wearily no! For her and her hubby the hypnotist's crystal of easy money, feed greed and the dream of a home of our own, a home 18Brumaire hastens to add, which suited them both and in which they would spend most of their lives together. When asked, what about savings? None, nada, not a plug nickel, she came back with. And now, by December she very well will be out on the street unless the mortgage is restructured and renegoticated. Fat chance at that! Now here's a solid citizen of 'middle class America' whom you'd think is a model for others to follow. Well, they have. Usually the usual scold will say, people on welfare or in slums or in barrios drank from the same fount of snake oil the banks and mortgage companies were selling two cents on the barrel head even at that! Irresponsible, living beyond their means! Well the truer story is a reflexion of this young gal's tale of woe. Someone whom the system favoured, and it failed her and opened a deep wound of America's fraud, speculation, and easy marks for the banks and mortgage companies to exploit and walk away with fat wads of us$ in pocket. Did our gal learn anything? She did. She regretted thinking her granddad was an old fuddy duddy out of steep with the times; he wasn't in a way; he knew the horrors of the Great Depression, and yet even he couldn't save his granddaughter from her own desires and her times.