Don't know what sort of mortgage you have? Well, it's probably not that important anyway
Journalists who write about the housing meltdown occasionally get taken to task for not laying enough blame at the feet of the individual homeowners who were signing up for mortgages they should have known they couldn't afford. I, myself, have been accused of this. So in the interest of blaming homeowners their fair share, let me present a poll out today from Bankrate.com that shows more than a quarter of Americans don't even know what type of mortgage they have:
At least we're doing better than last year?
Barbara!
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1
Funny, but in the 2007 -> 2008 change we can see them learning fast.
(Perhaps "multiple types" should have been a choice.)
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2
Maybe if they made "defaulted" one of the options they could really cut down on the don't knows.
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3
Not really surprising. More shocking would be that lenders didn't know (didn't care) what kind of lendees they courted, or what kind of risk they were assuming and passing on to investors. More shocking still is that government stood by like the proverbial monkeys, see, hear, speak, no evil.
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4
There was an article yesterday on CNN where they interviewed Lauren Willis about the concept of teaching money management: http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/25/pf/teaching_money.moneymag/index.htm?postversion=2008082605
Her premise is that good financial skills cannot be taught, and doing so is actually doing more harm than good.
Personally, I feel that more education is better in just about any situation. I think I agree with her on the major point teach In order for the teaching to be effective the 'student' needs to be willing to learn, and when it comes to financial topics people aren't always ready to learn. Especially when it's so easy to keep going down the path that they're going.
I wonder how many of those 26 percenters aren't going to learn, and can't be taught, until they've been burned.
Additionally I find in interesting that the number of interest only and arm loans stayed about the same, while the number of fixed rate increased at the same rate the don't knows decreased. Unless a lot of people refinanced, maybe a higher number of people got fixed rate mortgages than the media leads us to believe.
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5
@MBirchmeier: From the Mortgage Bankers Association (a release on mortgage originations dated 7/29/08)—"For first mortgages, fixed-rate loans (excluding [interest-only]) accounted for 63.6 percent of loans in the second half of 2007 compared to 53.4 percent in the first half of 2007." Those percentages are based on dollar volume of originated loans.
As for Lauren Willis, I was prepared to be very angry, but then I read to the end of the Q&A, and I do get her point, that we can't only rely on giving people information. It's like in the 1990s, when 401(k)s started offering dozens of fund options. Thinking since then has come around to offering fewer options, and a lifecycle (i.e., all-in-one) fund as a default. Even though you give people all the prospectuses, that doesn't mean they read them, or understand them, or don't load up on some tech fund, because tech seems hot.
Still, I think that if you take out a $200,000 loan for a house, you should be able to articulate to a pollster what type of loan it is.
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6
"Still, I think that if you take out a $200,000 loan for a house, you should be able to articulate to a pollster what type of loan it is."
If we could rely on people to think a lot of things would be simpler.
As for Lauren Willis her main point, that people don't understand what they're getting into, seems make a lot of sense for these home loan statistics too. Still I feel the answer is more education, maybe even at the grade/high school level, introducing the basics, so people aren't overwhelmed, or at least confident enough to realize they're in over their head and seek out help.
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