Housing Slump

I am getting more and more scared of this housing slump. Don’t get me wrong, I am in my place to stay and have not entertained any thoughts of moving to a more appropriate living space since this all started this summer and I will be in my current condo until it is most likely paid off. In fact I am trying to get to the point where I can double my payments to save a boat load of mortgage interest by paying it off early. 

This mortgage blog that says they have free mortgage quotes has news and articles about the housing bust and has a tough love view of the market. They say it is good that people are loosing homes that are not in a position to pay them off or make payments and that this is a natural adjustment process in the economy. I don’t agree with that.

I think that the Realtors and banks should have to deal with the penalty of not making as much money now that they pushed the boundaries so far and offering fixed rate refinancing to people who can’t afford these balloon payments is a good thing for the economy and helps them learn their lesson, because they created this problem. You cant plaster every surface with ads and run TV commercials 24/7 on every home makeover show there is and say it’s the consumer’s fault.

The Realtors, banking, finance and housing guys pushed too hard and got people to sign on to bad lending deals that are impossible for anyone to pay. And they thought they would get away with it? That it’s ok? They should be responsible for cleaning up the mess. It’s their problem.

The U.S. Mortgage & Lender Mess

The mortgage and lending crash just keeps getting worse. I don’t know which is worse, the people not reading the contracts they sign and not understanding the terms involved with a baloon payment or adjustable rate or the banks and financial companies offering such bad manipulative terms. It seems like no one really did any research before buying these properties and now they are all foreclosing. I was just reading that the number of forclosures has doubled in the past 12 months for the month of September year over year. Yikces! And they say this isn’t the last of it. How many people are going to be loosing their homes and foreclosed on at Christmas and over the holidays? This is such a disaster for this country as a whole and a little embarassing to the rest of the world. Here we are suposedly the most wealthy nation in the world and people are loosing their homes. It’s sad and it’s the result of people not doing adequate research and getting bad mortgage advice from predatory lenders. Do yourself a favor and stay renting until you have 20% to put down as a down payment on a home and then do your research and go with a lender who has lent to a friend who has not had any problems with their mortgage and has had it for more than 5 years.

Hard Drive Recovery

Last year my old computer crashed. It was 3 years old, full of spyware and viruses that I couldn’t get off of it and on top of it the hard drive went out. I looked into hard drive data recovery services, but at the time I was not sure that would work and I didn’t want to spend a ton of money if it might not work. Now I wish I had.

I had my life on the computer. Everything from my taxes to my work was on that hard drive. If I had gotten a hard drive recovery service to salvage at least part of it, I would not have had to completley start all my records from scratch again.

Imagine though even higher stakes with a business. All your business records today is stored digitally and if your hard drive crashes, you have to recover it. But then again if you are a business, why aren’t you backing up your files nightly?  A hard drive recovery service would be the first person you would call.

As my luck would have it, I was reading about this hard drive recovery service today that can restore and repair most anything. Where was this when I needed it a year ago? Why didn’t I back it up then? Well now I do have an external HD and I do back things up, but if I need a hard drive recovery service, I have one of those too. It’s always good to have a plan B.