True story from the mortgage meltdown 10 years ago.
Usually, I try to be the voice of common sense, conservation of energy, and moving on after a debacle.
The client I saw the other day had the warrior side of me overwhelming the lawyer’s logic.
The facts: the client, an immigrant carpenter with limited English literacy, “invested” in a rental house with partners who bailed on him. The loan was the typical sub prime, adjustable rate loan where the rents on the house could never have covered the debt service.
Then the “friendly” real estate professional helped him borrow some money on the rental to pay the closing costs on a no-money-down purchase of a home for himself. Realtor gets a real estate commission on the purchase and a fat commission on the two loans to buy the house.
Again there were supposed to be partners who would contribute to the debt service and own some interest in the property. None of it was in writing, others bail, and again my client is left holding the mortgage “bag”.
Meanwhile, the home’s value goes down and the mortgage payments go up. While the client is willing to walk away from the rental, some self interested “expert” tells him that if he defaults on the rental mortgages, he will lose his home, on which he is current, even though the property is upside down.
He works huge amounts of overtime, loses sleep, figures he will lose everything. He’s near tears when he sees me.
The good news in this scenario is, such as it is, that all the client has invested in these deals is about $15,000, and a year and a half of inflated mortgage payments on “investments” that are worthless now, and probably when purchased.
When I analyzed the first loan on the home, I calculated what the mortgage payment would be if, instead of an exploding ARM, it were a conventional, 30 year fixed rate note at 6.5%. The answer was that the monthly mortgage payment on a loan of that size, if it could be restructured, equaled his gross monthly income!
What lender makes such a loan?
The rational part of me wants to tell the client, take your lumps, be glad you didn’t lose any more than you did following the American dream.
The warrior side of me says, who were this guy’s friends who engineered these “deals”, with commissions to themselves? Who gets away with misrepresenting the consequences of a foreclosure on the rental? Who were the lenders who participated in exploiting a simple man who couldn’t read the relevant documents?
Again, my advice will probably be to live in the property payment free til the lender forecloses . But my personal inclination is to sue the assorted bastards involved in this mess.
