Foreclosing Florida

The news has been littered with these stories for the past year, and I am getting sick of the theme of owners who didn't read the paper work.

I have a close friend who bought a A.R.M. mortgage thinking he could just sell it before his rate resets and he'll come out on top. Well that is what a good bunch of these buyers thought. PLUS! You don't have to worry about people coming after you for the foreclosure. They just jack your credit and you have to move out.

The reason these loans are attractive is because in the early 2000s and the recession the housing market slowed, lenders jacked up the A.R.M. deals and made it so subprimers didn't have to prove their asset value. Well to consumers that is great because if you can buy a home and not tell the bank you can't afford it that's great.

Mismanaged Consuming is the real theme here.

"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things in life" from the Preamble of the Constitiution of the Industrial Workers of the World(I.W.W)
Go Obama!

re:plusaf's rant
WOW!
First off-look up The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt by Teresa A. Sullivan, or The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren, or Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class -- And What We Can Do About It by Thom Hartmann and many others like it that will prove to you the current decline of the middle class-also i havent heard any new news about this all of a sudden burgening upper class, have you?Unfortunately, they(lower middle class families) are going nowhere but down, especially due to the lack of education, in public and private schools-publics dont have the funding to care and the privates have too much to provide an alternative to those that do.
The reference to Monopoly and other games like it is meant to show the falsity with which this sub-prime mortgage industry had advertised itself. If poor folks had previous experience with these kinds of things, educations in social economics, they would have known that it was too good to be true. Theres only so much legal jargon a non-college educated person can understand. {And if they had gone to college, 1, they'd theoretically be making more money. and 2, would have understood the cycle of the economy and how it would not work in their favor in the end,-so therefore wouldnt be in the predicament in the first place.The population obviously targeted in this scam were poor young to middle-aged, lower to middle class minorities.}
sure it sounds good-but we all know bout things that sound good right?Wrong! we dont-so it should have been the job of "Big Brother" to not scandalize us, but to help bring everybody up.
Are we so selfish to not want your society as a whole to be succesful, a strong America. Sure, there can be more rich or more poor people but the current gap between the two is astounding.And the majority of those at the very top, didnt get there through hard work and perseverance, its passed down family wealth-and we all know what happened to the majority(African-Americans) of the lower class' family wealth, it was stolen, along with our brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers on the block, the auction block.(Shout out to Black HIstory Month)
Also, you cant frame sub-prime mortgages as hand-outs-these people paid then, and everyones paying now, for the greed of a few.
If you look at the current map of high forclosure rates, you can see these cities were not on the top 100 best places to live..they are poor neighborhoods already, next to ones even worse. HOW can you blame these families for seeing a way out of the ghetto, trying to find away to live away from the crime, trying to seek out better schools in better areas with more money-just to have it all stripped way again when the "Market" decides it so-my heart goes out to all of them who were intentionally trying to make a better life for themselves and their families and didnt have the prior education to know what was really gonna happen.

Great pod Justin!

If somebody ever put a sign on my front lawn....

Excellent pod here. Really well composed and super timely.

I really identified with the main character who managed to get her house out of foreclosure. You got us into her house and we were very close to her so her face and eyes really rang her story through. One thing that confused me is you introduced her and then went straight to the foreclosure expert before the other woman had her first soundbyte -- it lost me for a second but not a major hangup obviously.

You really managed to capture the feeling on the street in Florida right now -- foreclosure central. I would have liked to have heard some numbers about how many people are in foreclosure etc. But this was still a really great piece here.

You took us to the courthouse which also gave the piece a really good feeling of movement -- we were not just stationary, we saw the people who are profiting from the foreclosures. Really well done inclusion on that.

Lastly, by getting so close to the woman who was your main subject, you really managed to capture the conflict of what it must feel like to be faced with losing a home. And the other man who talked about the fixed rates vs. adjustable rate (can't find the $800 when you could hardly find the $500) was really good.

Overall, really nice job.

o boy

Thank you Justin for making this video. My sister is currently in the process of possibly losing her home and with the information provided here I am able to at least advise her to seek an attorney. Contributing to the community is this way is such a blessing! A+ Mister Mitchell, A+!

Leroy Mobley

This pod shows the sad state of our American society today:the issue of the disappearing middle class. The gap between the rich and the poor is ever growing and instead of the have-nots dreaming and acheiving something bigger and better like home ownership, the real American Dream is being realized-taking advantage of the disadvantaged in order to make a profit for oneself.
I would venture to guess that this foreclosure crisis will go down in history as a similar situation to Enron and the energy crisis(The smartest bankers in the room?) where some smart guys said-lets make a new product in this unchanged mortgage industry that will totally dupe and ruin the lower-middle and lower classes to further widen the gap...and then when they fail, we and others like us will buy up all their property at below maket value.
The only thing that foreclosure is good for is making the rich richer and the poor...destitute.
Its a shame not everyone got the chance to play Monopoly as a child to see how "this" game is really played.

Very good work Justin. This whole issue makes me sick to my stomach, how an entire closet industry has formed around the buying and selling of foreclosed properties. Every time I turn on the TV or radio, I hear "GET A BEAUTIFUL HOME AT A FRACTION OF THE COST, FORECLOSURES ARE GROWING IN YOUR AREA MAKING FOR A GOLDEN INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY RIGHT NOW." I'm sorry, but there is nothing golden about a family that has fallen on hard times and cannot come up with their rent. Foreclosures are NEVER a good thing for anybody in my opinion and the fact that profits are being made from evicting hard working families just turns my stomach.

i agree w/ spacetraveler on all fronts... its a damn shame this crisis is going on. reminds me of the people at enron who architected what turned out to be a huge fall out, leaving many to suffer.

"smartest men in the room" is a great doc on it, i highly recommend it.

This is a heartfelt easily spoken soft paced piece which balances and explains the issues so anyone can understand the basic issue, but more importantly what they can do if face with the same. I hope treasury secretary Paulson, formerly of head of Goldman Sachs, is pulled across the coals for this his role in architecting the subprime mortgage market.