Posted by
Playful Walrus on Thursday, February 10, 2011 5:31:56 PM
Did you make sensible decisions about your housing? When the housing market was high, did you rent or lease, or buy a modest condo, perhaps in a lesser area, when your goal was to get a house or a nicer condo in a better area? Did you save up and/or wait for the market to come down before going for your goal? Did you stick with a reputable mortgage you could afford? Have you paid your bills?
SUCKER!!!
Here are the details reported by Alejandro Lazo in the
Los Angeles Times.
More than 100,000 struggling homeowners could get help from a $2-billion program that California is launching, including about 25,000 borrowers who owe more than their properties are worth and could see their mortgages shrink.
The Keep Your Home California program, which uses federal funds reserved for the 2008 rescue of the financial system, has the potential to make a sizable dent in California's foreclosure crisis and help the general housing market. State officials hope to fend off foreclosure for about 95,000 borrowers and provide moving assistance to about 6,500 people who do lose their homes.
Federal funds. Why not just reduce the federal income taxes on Californians?
Out of the five major mortgage servicers — Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Ally Financial and Citigroup Inc. - only Ally has formally signed on to a key part of the plan: reducing mortgage principal on homes that are "underwater," or worth less than the size of the mortgage. A Bank of America spokesman said the bank intends to participate but hasn't yet reached a formal agreement with the California Housing Finance Agency, which designed the program.
Are you with any of these companies?
By keeping some cheap foreclosed properties from reaching the market, the program could give a boost to home values in general.
So if you've waited to buy, you'll have to pay higher prices.
The biggest of the plan's four parts allocates $875 million as temporary financial help to people who have seen their paychecks cut or have lost their jobs, providing as much as $3,000 a month for six months to cover home payments and associated costs. The second-largest chunk of money, $790 million, is slated for a principal reduction program that would write down the value of an estimated 25,135 underwater mortgages.
Another piece would use $129 million to provide as much as $15,000 apiece to help homeowners get current on their mortgages, and another would take $32 million to provide moving assistance for people who can't afford to remain in their homes.
I'm a SUCKER!
The principal-reduction component would pay lenders $1 for every dollar of mortgage debt forgiven.
So in other words, my tax dollars are going to be given away to other homeowners.