“Think about this, when you fill out the forms for the modification program you give up all, and I do mean all of your personal financial information. The servicers, not investors or even the investors representatives know all about you. They know how much you are making, they know how much is in your retirement account, they know how much your car payment is, they know how much you pay for cable, newspapers, magazines; they even know how much you tithe to your church. But they want to “help” you, right?
Given what we know about how these guys operate, I have come to think of it more in terms of the fox inventorying the hen house and taking volunteers. Savings? Check, drained those. IRA & 401K”s check, drained those. Monthly cash flows? Hmmmm, from what we can see, we should be able to bleed you for another three months before you totally fail and then we can slam you into the foreclosure, put you into the street, sell your house to someone else or better yet to ourselves and start the process all over again.”
The Special Drawer
I was visiting with a friend this week and explaining to him about MERS and why he should be concerned on whether or not he had MERS on his mortgage. I was explaining to him how MERS, by its very nature had separated the debt from the deed while making sausage of ownership. The net result is a worthless, unenforceable piece of paper and obliterated ownership. I explained to him that my aha moment came when I realized that since they didn’t keep my mortgage in a special drawer, that these issues applied to everyone.
He laughed at this concept. Putting on his most outrageous cheerful bureaucratic/Mr. Gameshow face he mimed reaching down to a drawer, pulling out a file, “Ah, yes. Mr. Trotter, thank you very much for coming in. Oh~! You are early. We weren’t expecting you for another two months. What happened? Car trouble? What’s that? A new clutch? Yes, that would throw our calculations a bit off now, wouldn’t it? Oh, well, doesn’t matter, we know how to deal with these things. We’ll have you fixed up in no time. Yes, yes, I see you are scheduled for foreclosure. When do you think you can move out?”
Playing along with the scene, I said, “Yes, I wasn’t expecting car trouble. I thought the water heater was bad but I was able to fix that myself and the parts weren’t too expensive. Wait, scheduled for foreclosure? What do you mean? When did you do that?”
He squinted down his nose and peered through his glasses at an imaginary piece of paper. “Ah, it says here we scheduled you for foreclosure four and a half years ago. Does that sound about right to you?
“That’s when I signed my mortgage~!”
“That’s when you were scheduled.”
We both got a good chuckle out of the concept of bureaucracy run mad but as I was leaving his house I got to thinking, you know, that’s not that far off the mark.
We know from the SEC’s filing against Goldman Sachs that “the brilliant ones” had been designing these things to fail so they could bet against them. And here is the thing, when you are designing them, you can tell within a few weeks when they will fail by looking at the specs of the loan. You know when the reset occurs, you know what the reset will be, and you know that when the payment doubles, it won’t be too long before the borrower fails. Three months after reset? Four months? What do the actuarial tables indicate?
We also know short sales and loan mods are a suckers game because in order for a loan to be modded, one must deal with the investor directly. And since no one knows who the investor who owns the loan is, there is no one to negotiate with. There is a way around this, but the servicing company must buy the loan out of the structured vehicle or replace it with one that is substantially similar. And since these loan pools are failing at high rates, the odds of either of those items happening are two, slim & none.
This led me to consider this whole Help for Homeowners or HAMP or whatever it is called where my government will pay these banks $5000 to modify my loan. We know from the preceding paragraph why that can’t happen, so what is this $5,000 program all about?
Think about this, when you fill out the forms for the modification program you give up all, and I do mean all of your personal financial information. The servicers, not investors or even the investors representatives know all about you. They know how much you are making, they know how much is in your retirement account, they know how much your car payment is, they know how much you pay for cable, newspapers, magazines; they even know how much you tithe to your church. But they want to “help” you, right?
Given what we know about how these guys operate, I have come to think of it more in terms of the fox inventorying the hen house and taking volunteers. Savings? Check, drained those. IRA & 401K”s check, drained those. Monthly cash flows? Hmmmm, from what we can see, we should be able to bleed you for another three months before you totally fail and then we can slam you into the foreclosure, put you into the street, sell your house to someone else or better yet to ourselves and start the process all over again.
And why would they want to do that? Easy. The main money comes if they can sell it to an individual. If an individual doesn’t show up at auction, they sell your house to one of their in house Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT) for pennies on the dollar, and then the REIT turns around and offers it to the local house rental company to put it out for rent at a price that more than covers the $20K mortgage payment they owe on it. So for all of you poor sods out there who have been wondering what you have to do to find real estate that you can buy for less than the mortgage payment, the answer is, you can’t. The banks have it locked up.
I’ve been discussing loan mods with foreclosure friends for several months and we’ve concluded it is nothing but a slow process of financial rape. Tell them what you’ve got and sure enough they will take it before bringing down the final axe. Of course, that event is probably timed months in advance. We imagined communications with a “mill” firm along the lines of “Prepare complaint for S. Johnson of 123 Broad St. and file November 12, 2010.”