{"id":187777,"date":"2011-03-07T20:14:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-08T01:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/03\/07\/your-moment-of-schadenfreude-3\/"},"modified":"2011-03-07T20:14:00","modified_gmt":"2011-03-08T01:14:00","slug":"your-moment-of-schadenfreude-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/03\/07\/your-moment-of-schadenfreude-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Moment of Schadenfreude"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Dayen notes that, “A Liberal Is a Villager Who\u2019s Been Screwed By a Mortgage Servicer<\/a>, and if this is the case, Washington Post<\/i> hard core villager Dana Milbank has just discovered liberalism<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Behind the foreclosure crisis, big banks’ reign of error<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

By Dana Milbank
Sunday, March 6, 2011;<\/p>\n

The problem in the nation’s housing market now isn’t subprime lending. It’s subpar lenders.<\/p>\n

Last fall, my wife and I refinanced our mortgage with Citibank. Sixty days later, we received a “cancellation notice” from our homeowners insurance company “for non-payment of premium.”<\/p>\n

Turns out Citibank, which had been collecting hundreds of dollars a month from us to pay the insurer, hadn’t made the payments. It was, I later learned, one of the usual tricks mortgage servicers use to squeeze more cash out of their customers. About a month later, I learned of another trick: Citibank informed us that it was increasing our monthly payment by nearly $300.<\/p>\n

Along the way, a simple refi became a months-long odyssey: rates misquoted, interest charged on a phantom account, legal documents issued in wrong names, a mortgage officer who disappeared for days at a time (first it was his birthday, then his laptop was in the shop), a bounced check from Citibank’s own title company, and the freezing of our bank accounts.<\/p>\n

For me, this amounts to no more than the hassle of arguing with Citibank to fix its “mistakes.” But consumer advocates tell me these are typical of the screw-ups by the big banks that service home mortgages. And these errors – accidental or otherwise – are driving large numbers of people into default and foreclosure when it otherwise would not have happened.<\/p>\n

It’s a bad situation – and the new majority in the House is poised to make it even worse. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He got seriously boned by his bank, and now he realizes that it ain’t just a bunch of deadbeats who are trying to stiff the banks.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, he’s also singing the praises of HAMP, which was clearly constructed for the benefit of the banks at the expense of homeowners by Obama and His Evil Minions\u2122<\/sup>, so he’s still that lovable clueless scamp we’ve always known.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Dayen notes that, “A Liberal Is a Villager Who\u2019s Been Screwed By a Mortgage Servicer, and if this is the case, Washington Post hard core villager Dana Milbank has just discovered liberalism: Behind the foreclosure crisis, big banks’ reign of error By Dana MilbankSunday, March 6, 2011; The problem in the nation’s housing market …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,978,1088,1019],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-politics","category-real-estate","category-schadenfreude"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187777"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187777\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}