Here’s how I feel about this. Buying a home that costs over a million dollars and then making zero mortgage payments for five years while using ever tool in the book to avoid and postpone foreclosure is not a socially responsible thing to do. But look at their excuse:
“It was never our intention to get here and never make a mortgage payment,” Keith Ritter said. “We don’t believe in living for free.”
But he and Janet, a 51-year-old real estate agent, make no apology for using every tactic available to them to stay in their house, including challenging the foreclosure sale in court, requesting mediation and claiming they had a tenant living with them. Their adversaries, they argued, are giant financial institutions with armies of lawyers that are out to make as much money as possible at the expense of homeowners.
In truth, they are just the other side of the coin. They’re holding up a mirror to the financial institutions that screwed the rest of us. This is how you look.
You are correct that the Ritters are no different in motive from the banks and mortgage companies, but I damned sure would not protect the banks and mortgage companies from the Ritters.
when you make NO mortgage payments…
it was EXACTLY your decision to run this scam on the banks.
they didn’t pay and ‘ get in over their heads’.
people who do that HAVE MADE MORTGAGE PAYMENTS.
what…
in between SIGNING the mortgage papers…
and that FIRST PAYMENT…
could make you have such an epiphany..
unless, you were gonna scam the bank from the get go
“”It was never our intention to get here and never make a mortgage payment,” Keith Ritter said. “We don’t believe in living for free.””
Then why didn’t you make a single payment? I don’t understand your analogy, Boo.
Well, I guess the idea is that if corporations can be sociopathic, People can too. Sort of a sociopathy-positive philosophy.
Here’s the tell:
Someone who knows how the system worked.
Someone whose source of income collapsed right after they bought the house.
Someone who was pissed off at the way the system worked.
Someone who wanted to take advantage of vulnerabilities in the system.
Someone who panicked.
So how did they pay the lawyers they needed for those multiple bankruptcies.
And btw, the WaPo story of one couple moved the spotlight away from thousands of folks who have been fraudulently foreclosed on by foreclosure mills, who don’t know who owns their mortgage because of MERS, and whose job disappeared because the packaging of credit default swaps tanked the economy.
And the WaPo just adds another moralistic story about an African-American family who was “taking advantage of the system”.
Ensuring that the real problems with banking never get fixed.
Banks took commercial deposits (customer’s money) and without their knowledge or consent bet that money in investment portfolios of mortgages and credit default swaps and lost hundreds of billions of dollars of customers’ money. Requiring a bailout from the US government.
But corporations get off the hook because they are not supposed to be moral. All of the moralism is reserved for people of color who wanted to live the “American Dream”.
yep. that’s pretty much how I saw it.
you are right on the money
This is impossible. Everyone knows that only poor black people used Fannie Mae to get mortgages for homes they couldn’t afford and it was Fannie Mae and Fannie Mae alone that destroyed the economy. At least that’s what all my conservative friends tell me and how could they all be wrong?