Friday

LOOK!

Yes, it's the longed for RAINDROPS ON ROSES! Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that it actually rained here. More like a drizzle. But, it looks good.

MORE FUN PICKING ON CHANNEL 10

I can't help it, they make it too easy. They've been running a commercial, with the tag line "Only on 10 news." The problem? It's an ad for game shows. Who Wants to be a Millionaire is news?

And now they announce with great excitement that they're going to show us the location of a story on their

PIN POINT NEWS TRACKER!!!!

It's a map. It's only a map. Please, just call it a map!

THE MORTGAGE MESS

It's still all over the news, the mortgage mess. People are loosing their homes, are the mortgage companies to blame? Let's take a look back. I bought my house in 2000, using a FHA loan with a buy-down and what is called an Access second. I borrowed more than the sale price, over 100% of the value. I got lucky. The value went up and I was able to refinance to a conventional fixed rate and avoid the higher payments that were coming due to the buy-down.

Why did prices go up so much so quickly? In part because the mortgage companies (and the investors who bought the loans) made it easier to obtain financing with lower payments and often no down payments. People started taking the equity out of their homes and using it to buy investment properties. Some people made a lot of money, but there comes a point where the sales price of a house can't be supported by the rent you can get for it, and that's where the breaking point was for home prices. And then the people who had recently bought houses with the negative amortization feature didn't have the increase in value to offset the higher amount they now owed on the house, and the payments went up and their income wasn't what the loan officers had stated it was, and the whole house of cards came crashing down.

Back when my house had first gone up in value a lot a loan officer tried to push me to use the equity and buy more properties. I didn't do it. My thought-I couldn't afford to buy my house at the higher value, so I couldn't afford to use the equity. I'm glad I didn't jump on that train, because I'd be in the train wreck with the rest of them. The only thing I DID was to obtain the biggest equity line of credit I could get, but didn't use it. I will use it now so that the dogs and I don't starve. Unemployment will pay the mortgage, but we gotta eat. And, with 50,000 people in the mortgage business out of work it doesnt look like there will be a enough jobs to absorb all of us back into the work force any time soon.

I TOLD YOU I HATE BAD GRAMMAR:

You Scored an A

You got 10/10 questions correct. It's pretty obvious that you don't make basic grammatical errors. If anything, you're annoyed when people make simple mistakes on their blogs. As far as people with bad grammar go, you know they're only human. And it's humanity and its current condition that truly disturb you sometimes.

The It's Its There Their They're Quiz