my understanding is that banks even as loan servicers have to deal with the shortfalls when someone takes a forbearance. And since this appears to be a free for all even for people that don’t need it, when a good percentage of the population stop making payments because they don’t have to , liquidity becomes a problem.

I think this might be why it’s also difficult to refinance right now because it appears they are capping loan applicants. And thats why I’m thinking if push comes to shove , they are somehow going to blacklist those that got a forebearance from future refinancing.. it makes sense because if the end goal is only allow X quantity of loans, all else being equal, who would you pick, someone that took a forbearance or someone that didn’t? Since most of the loans are FNMA and Freddie, they got to be keeping a record of it somewhere. And even though these forebearances aren’t going on your credit file, I wouldn’t be surprised if it come backs as one more marker to determine if they should extend a future loan to you. The sinister side of me says this would also be a clever way of locking people into a higher rate loan once rates continue to go down…since if they are going to take forebearance into consideration for future loan qualificatons, a good percentage of the population wouldn’t qualify then….I don’t think this free forebearance is really free. it’s going to come out of people’s pockets somehow at a future date. Afterall, we are talking about banks. Not Mary Poppins. It’s different for folks that really lost there job and cant make their payments because they have an immediate problem and probably not even thinking about future financing needs. But it just might be shooting oneself in the foot if you really don’t need it.