H.R. 1728: The Death of Creative Financing
By Mandelman - Last updated: Thursday, June 11, 2009 - Save & Share - Leave a CommentH.R. 1728 passed the House by an overwhelming majority in a record three days time. Now it’s in the Senate and is widely expected to pass quickly as well. Why the rush? Is AIG planning to hand out zillions in bonuses again?
My guess would be that our elected representatives and their banking benefactors would prefer that we don’t know anything about it.
Consider this scenario:
You own a house. You want to sell it.
Someone wants to buy it.
You decide to sell it to the person who wants to buy it and carry the paper yourself for whatever reason. Maybe you want the income instead of the cash. Maybe you’re just particularly fond of the buyer, I don’t know.
I’m sorry… you can’t. It’s illegal.
Huh? Excuse me. It’s my house… Why can’t I sell it to whomever I choose, however I choose.
Nope, sorry. You’ll have to become a “lender” and get a lender’s license.
Why? I’m not a lender.
Well, because you’re only allowed to sell your own house once every three years without going through the bank for a mortgage. And there are a lot more rules than that, believe it or not.
It has to be a 30-year, fully amortizing loan and you must comply with RESPA regulations, provide Truth in Lending documentation, and “verify” that the borrower is able to repay the loan, just like the banks don’t.
You can read the bill for yourself… I’m going to stop right here for a moment.
The moniker for the HR 1728 bill is the Mortgage Lending and Anti-Predatory Lending Act, so it sounds absolutely fabulous, doesn’t it? It sounds like something we’ve needed for a long time… a bill to stop “predatory lending”. Who could possibly be against that?
(Before I go on, I’d like to register my extreme displeasure at being treated like I’m four years old by our elected representatives. They obviously believe that I’ll be happy to eat cow pies if they’ll just call them Ding Dongs.)
Look, obviously this is an important piece of legislation. After all, just look at what caused this unstoppable catastrophic meltdown in the first place. If it weren’t for a bunch of individual homeowners selling their own homes to other people and carrying back the paper themselves we never would have gotten into this mess in the first place. Those sellers obviously have to be stopped.
There’s another clause in this bill that I found absolutely unbelievable. The bill says that if you own rental units and the government decides that you’re at risk of foreclosure, the government can seize your property… before you’re foreclosed on, mind you. Someone wakes up in the morning and decides that you might lose your units to foreclosure, and you are screwed.
You want time to go over that one again? It’s perfectly understandable if you do.
What it said was that the legislation makes it possible for the government to seize your rental units if they deem that you are at risk of losing the property to foreclosure. I assume the intent is to prevent renters from being put out of their rented homes, which is perfectly understandable because everyone knows that it’s only okay to put actual homeowners out of their homes.
Now, I know that usually I like to go into some level of detail on these types of things, but this time I’m keeping it short and sweet. A memo ought to do it…
The callout continues:
H.R. 1728: The Death of Creative Financing � Mandelman Matters
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