A great article about foreclosure and how it effected one family in Southern California...

A great article about foreclosure and how it effected one family in Southern California...

The Never Ending Foreclosure

Finance in the News w/e 1/9/16

Finance in the News for the week ending 1/9/16.

This is my first financial post of the new year!

1)
Just when you think the country has gotten passed the ridiculousness of the subprime mortgage crisis and learned its lesson having to bail out under capitalized financial institutions, Fannie Mae has devised a way to entice those desperate to own a home with another high risk mortgage product:

Fannie Mae Rolls Out Easy Mortgage, Catering To High-Risk Immigrants Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/010716-788747-government-wants-to-lend-more-to-high-risk-immigrants

https://www.fanniemae.com/singlefamily/homeready

2)
Powerball soars to a new record high $800M with a drawing tonight at 8PM. Image having an extra $400M laying around after taxes. Wow. And remember, you can't win if you don't play.

http://www.powerball.com/

http://abcnews.go.com/US/powerball-drawing-clues-previous-lottery-winners/story?id=36143401

3)
Millennials are debt averse. I should know. My twenty-something son, who still lives at home, is one.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-11/these-millennials-are-socking-away-15-of-their-salary

Yahoo! News Story - US regulator sues JPMorgan, RBS in subprime probe - Yahoo! News

US regulator sues JPMorgan, RBS in subprime probe - Yahoo! News
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110620/bs_afp/usbritainregulatejusticebankingcompaniesjpmorganrbs
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Yahoo! News
http://news.yahoo.com/

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?

Doomsday

The feeling of impending doom in the pit of my stomach finally occurred, as expected. Yesterday, I was laid off from my job. I worked for this company for approximately 4 years and 184 days, give or take holidays, sick days, and rare personal day. It also was the same length of time I have been in the mortgage industry. Not many left can say they worked there longer than I did. As my friend would say, I wore many hats. I was the collateral control manager at one time, the vault manager, a supervisor. I handled trailing documents, collateral files, credit files, imaging, shipping, document exceptions, notary, MERS, assignments, and in the end, customer complaints, per diem interest refunds, and correspondence processing for the Legal Dept. and Servicing. I set-up processes and defined systems, programs, and wrote procedures. I learned about things I would not have thought I would of ever needed to know, like FIPS, geocoding, census tracts, crystal reports, and more SQL queries than you can shake a stick at because for the most part, I was my own report writer, too.

Prior to this, the company and it's investor were my clients. I networked to get into this job and now it's basically gone because the funding faucet was turned off yesterday. No fundings means no job for me.

So now what? Well, I have a few things I want to get done this week around the house. I'm working on my budget, I have to make a doctors appointment while I have my medical insurance and I'm networking again to see if my friends can get me a job, too. I will temp again, if I have to, but all in all I'm in better shape than most financially. I am hopeful because right now, the doom is gone and hope and looking forward is all I've got.

Black Wednesday

"Black Wednesday" was the phrase that someone used at work two days ago. It's one of those days that you can predict the impending doom of the A.M. scheduled mandatory corporate meeting. I can't go into detail specifically where I work because I'm one of those beleaguered employees of "that" financial sector that gets all of the bad news and finger pointing now-a-days. Let me tell you, there is nothing wrong with subprime home loans when you can afford the home you bought and are actually able pay your payments and on time. Whats wrong with subprime is that people on many different levels took advantage of the situation and now it's just ugly. It's ugly for the homeowner who needs a loan, but has glitches in their credit. It's ugly for the companies who originated and bought pools of these loans because now the properties are all being devalued due to massive waves of default. It's ugly for the workers of the companies that were abruptly let go, laid off, or had the office doors closed and locked behind them at the end of the day. I read somewhere today while reviewing a news article about HSBC's Decision One closings it's doors that about 100 companies have had a similar fate this year and more are to come due to the subprime woes. I'm sitting tight because right now a good job in the mortgage industry is hard to find but as each day goes by, I still have this heavy feeling of doom in the pit of my stomach.