Thursday, December 13, 2007

Riding the orange spiral slide down

O.K., so I was laid off on November 6th and my company is going out of business on March 30th. Generally speaking, greed and fraud killed subprime lending. Wall Street investment banks put the brakes on all of their loan purchases because they wanted value from their investment and the ensuing credit squeeze is making everyone that's still sitting on an adjustable rate mortgage quite nervous. I am also one of those in that group of people, too.

Now, I read today in the OC Register that not only is greed and fraud prevalent in mortgage lending, but also in corporate real estate. O.C. Billionaire Igor Olenicoff, ironically the owner of the building I worked in for over four and a half years pleaded guilty to tax felony, has been convinced of lying on his taxes and paid 52 million in back taxes. He could face up to three years in prison when he's sentenced on April
14th. Link to the news article

I've been in the position before where I made a career decision in an economic stressful time. Actually, it's what lead me to move to Orange County in 1992. My step-sister(at the time) needed help with the rent, so I moved to Fullerton and rented a room from her for a little over a year. At that time, I was a bank teller and I moved right after Bank of America bought out Security Pacific National Bank, so many branches were consolidated and closed. There were banking professionals laid off all over the place. I chose to quit my Merchant Teller job in Rialto because I did not feel safe in that branch. I thought if I could work somewhere, anywhere but there, I'd feel better about being a Teller and working with money on a daily basis.

After being unemployed for almost two months, I was running out of money and getting nervous about Christmas which was about four weeks away when landed a temp to perm job the day after Thanksgiving thanks to BankForce. They called me up and asked if I could file, not realizing that I used to manually pay checks, and I replied, "Alpha or numeric?" Ninety days later, I was employed at my first real job with a salary and not just an hourly wage, decent benefits and... taadaa... chickenpox! My son brought them home from kindergarten while attending school in Fullerton.

That job turned into a ten year career and my last title there was "Custody Account Manager". That job forced me to gain a big picture view of and terminology related to investment banking, something I never even thought about before I got that job. After ten years and a change in ownership, I felt I hit a ceiling and the working environment was more about the numbers than the people, so I looked for my next job. I found it in a clients account and networked to get a position as the "Collateral Control Manager" of the mortgage company that I am laid off from.

I kind of had to laugh that the National Mortgage News reported a decline in mortgage job losses. Welp, if your industry killed off over 400,000 jobs, are there that many left to even take away? Just this week, Option One, Washington Mutual and Lending Tree announced job losses if not right out closures.

How low can we go?

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