Posted on 10/12/2009 3:23:53 PM PDT by Kartographer
Kevin's homebuilding business collapsed in the recession, and they couldn't pay the mortgage. Their bank, JPMorgan Chase, rejected the Martins' request for a mortgage modification and took legal possession of the house Aug. 19.
On their anniversary two days later, the Martins and their two young children moved in with Kevin's aunt in her small condominium in Charbonneau. They're broke, unemployed and visibly stunned at their rapid plunge from the middle class to the newly poor.
A bomb of debt vaporized the Martins' once-comfortable life. The heavy load of leverage they had assumed in hopes of grabbing their piece of the pie proved their undoing.
(Excerpt) Read more at oregonlive.com ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P36x8rTb3jI
The blue state blues.
He should at least qualify for one of the millions of “shovel-ready” jobs 0 promised us.
Saving was always the norm - Credit and debt for the average family is a new invention:
Credit Cards:
1959 - option of maintaining a revolving balance was introduced. Cardholders no longer had to pay off their full bills at the end of each cycle.
1966 - a national credit card system was formed when a group of credit-issuing banks joined together and created the InterBank Card Association
1987 - American Express issued a credit card allowing customers to pay over time rather than at the end of every month.
....hate to be a pessimist, but I think it’s going to get much worse before it gets better....at least during the Great Depression people didn’t have all that debt.
I cannot feel bad about unemployment, the newly-poor, bankruptcies, etc., as long as Soetoro is in the White House. All these stories mean to me is: There’s somebody who’s not going to vote for Soetoro the next time.
When or if he is out of the White House, then I will will feel bad about bankruptcies, foreclosures, destitution, etc.
Who did these people think they were, government employees with secured jobs and lottery style benefits and opulent government retirement pensions?
The people in the article were never middle class. They were ALWAYS poor. Credit just allowed them to pretend they weren’t.
Kevin should have got a government job!
They would have been middle class as long as they stayed married and away from the credit cards.
Debt and divorce and Obama make people poor.
All these millions out of work would still have jobs if they'd only gotten government jobs!
Reading the article and quite a few of the follow-up comments, I’d have to say that hope and change thing isn’t working out very well.
The parent article pointed out that this was a result of several poor decisions on the buyer’s part. They were always over-leveraged and in reality could not afford the home. Putting people in a home they cannot afford is no favor to them.
Good point.
And just wait until people such as those described in the article get hit with ostammer’s fines and penalties for not having health insurance.
And then there’s the looming massive energy cost increases for the new “green” energy they’ll be forced to pay......or freeze.
Yeah, many will be living a truly “green” existence soon - sleeping in an open field, using the far side of a fallen tree as a private potty place, hauling water in a bucket up from a stream, and home cooking over a roaring campfire.
I learned all I need to know about modern bubbles from my parents.
When my parents bough their first home, it was furnished spartanly with hand-me downs and seconds. Decades after buying their first home, they finally had a furnished house with a real solid, full bed, dining room set, etc...
Today’s young couples not only buy more house than they can actually afford, they then pull out the credit cards and go on a furnishing rampage, endebting themselves to the hilt.
I feel very sorry for everyone who is going through horrible economic times. Moving back in with the folks and being poor again must be terrible. At the same time, most of these people were way overextended, instead of being patient and waiting until they had the cash to make their purchases, and scaling up their lifestyle over a lifetime of work, rather than insantly as if lottery winners.
Most of these people have made their own bed and then call that “the American Dream”. The American Dream takes hard work before you get over the hump. It doesn’t come all at once. If you want to pretend it comes all at once on a mountain of debt, then you are due for a rude awakening.
After 50 years of playing, the entire nation is getting a rude awakening. You can’t pay people for doing nothing. Moving little scraps of paper around on the margin is not a substitute for manufacturing and production. Our economy has been an illusion for 20-30 years as we have allowed illegal aliens and the Chinese to colonize our nation. The mirror is now broken and the illusion is gone. Wait until monster inflation comes — that will wake up the people all over again. They will still be living with the parents, only food and gas will be painfully expensive.
It’s almost always the same story over and over, living far beyond your means and then being shocked when it collaspes. Many people are learningthe hard way about how to live within their means. These folks are lucky that they had a place to go mny families are in shelters or in their cars from living like this.
Average people were much worse off with debt during the great depression than today. People were deeply on the margin in the stock market and in real estate. The amount of debt your average Joe was using to speculated in stocks and real estate was catastrophic. I think private debt is much less today than it was during the great depression (if you ignore all of the credit derivatives nobody is talking about anymore.) However, government debt is far higher today than it was during the great depression AND we have a mature economy that doesn’t have decades of growth from honest productive industries in the future. The FIRE economy will no longer suport us. We need to find real jobs to do now if our economy is going to grow. Alternative energy is a promising sector and technology is always promising.
The Oregonian | 10/10/09 | Jeff Manning
The heavy load of leverage they had assumed in hopes of grabbing their piece of the pie proved their undoing.
No Jeff, pursuing a heavy load of leveraged debt is not "The American Dream".
Excellent article - thanks for posting.
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