Re: WC 150K Post Challenge - You Ready?!
Here's something to wrap your head around...
The whole financial market is about trading debt and making money on it.
Mortgages = debt
Where things went wrong is that they starting delving into the territory of high risk debt and bundling it together with secure debt. No one really knew what they were trading and didn't care so long as they made money.
Then things went poof.
Here are my thoughts on this problem and N_LaRUE's excellent synopsis:
1. Banks got greedy
2. They started lending to anyone - including people without a pulse and without verifying anything...lots of people early on got into the action and made tons of money...but lots of other who shouldn't have qualified fora house got McMansions and then foreclosed on it once things started to go downhill.
But here are the downsides:
1. People like me who could afford to put 20% down and make regular payments without any problems, suddenly found really inflated home prices and with interest rates as they were we couldn't afford houses that in 2004 were easily within reach
2. Someohow we did manage to get a house in the heyday. But since we had put 20% down (which was a pretty big sum of money) there was less incentive to move after 2007 because then we would lose the down payment and owe the bank a crapload of loan money. Due to this reason, I did not take a job in CA in 2008 and also felt it was wrong to just walk away from a loan. Even in 2015 my gross salary is less than that offer in 2008 (I don't even want to count how much that would be especially with the stock that was offered along with the job as well).
3. After the whole thing blew up, I decided to just take the loss on the down payment and get rid of the property. I did not feel bad that the bank had to eat up a loss on their loan, guess why? It was their greed by lending to whoever and then converting bad mortgages to debt and selling it they had caused the mess to begin with and since I was taking a loss on my payment it was okay that they took that loss as well. On the flip side I paid every installment without any issues for 5+ years and my loan had only gone down 15K...so they had made quite a bit of money from me anyways...
Long story short, I am so scarred by that episode that I am really reluctant to buy a house now. And on top of that in CA the prices are ridiculous so...