There isn’t a single person on this board who doesn’t have the utmost in contempt for those individuals responsible for the fraud. HOWEVER there also isn’t anyone here who will sympathize with the people who were gambling on housing futures and who were knowingly agreeing to mortgage payments they could never hope to pay.
You can’t tell us that you didn’t understand that an Adjustable Rate Mortgage resets after a certain period of time or that those payments would vastly exceed your personal abilities to pay. I can figure out what a mortgage payment will be on a purchase price in about 20 seconds. There are so many online mortgage calculators it might have taken you 10 minutes to find one and figure out the same. You didn’t find out because you didn’t bother to find out. Whose fault is that?
It doesn’t take a private investigator or an outside expert to understand that racking 2 or 3 or 7 home purchases on a middle-range salary is not economically possible without a lottery-sized amount of risk, or that banks will not knowingly lend more than what a borrower can repay out of their earnings.
Whether you did it because you believe God wants the righteous to prosper or because you were being an agressive investor matters not. The fact remains that most of you signed on to purchase investment vehicles, sometimes totalling million dollars worth in multiple transactions; you were not just purchasing shelter for yourself and your family.
When my kids were 18 and were receiving all these credit card offers they all knew better than to get more than one card or to use those cards for anything other than emergencies. They didn’t need an outside expert to guide them towards making an informed decision about their use of credit. I have to believe on at least some level that all the adults involved in this tragic scheme had some understanding of what their limitations were and made conscious decisions to “be bold” and ignore those limitations.
Had your gamble paid off I’m pretty sure you guys wouldn’t be whining about the fraud it would have taken for that to happen, so I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for your losses. Without a doubt, your agressiveness has contributed to the problems the housing market in your area now faces. If not for your ill-advised purchases its possible housing prices in that area might not have gotten quite so high. 1,000 units is a lot of inventory to soak up. In fact, you should give some consideration to the idea that you guys are partially responsible for some of the losses currently being suffered by other buyers who were competing with you when you bought.
I don’t mess around with investing in derivatives because I don’t understand them. You should consider the same. Next time maybe you should stick to what you know.
