Posted on 03/05/2012 9:56:07 AM PST by reaganaut1
The eviction from their million-dollar home could come at any moment. Keith and Janet Ritter have been bracing for it — and battling against it — almost from the moment they moved into the five-bedroom, 4,900-square-foot manse along the Potomac River in Fort Washington.
In five years, they have never made a mortgage payment, a fact that amazes even the most seasoned veterans of the foreclosure crisis.
The Ritters have kept the sheriff at bay by repeatedly filing for bankruptcy and by exploiting changes in Maryland’s laws designed to help delinquent homeowners avoid foreclosure.
Those efforts to protect homeowners have transformed Maryland’s foreclosure process from one of the country’s shortest to one of the longest. It now takes on average 634 days to complete a foreclosure in Maryland, compared with 132 days in Virginia.
Champions of Maryland’s system, including Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), credit it with driving down the state’s foreclosure rate and helping thousands of victims of predatory lending, fraud and other abuses hang on to their homes.
“The market won’t fix itself,” said Anne Norton, Maryland’s deputy commissioner for financial regulations. “By the time it does, how many homeowners will be churned up and spit out by the machine?”
Critics, including economists and lenders, blame the state’s go-slow approach for a growing backlog of foreclosures and a weak-to-nonexistent recovery in home prices. To them, the system puts too much emphasis on helping individual homeowners and not enough on quickly clearing the market of foreclosures so prices can rebound and hard-hit communities can recover. And they say it also creates opportunities for abuse by those determined to drag the process out for as long as possible.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
What personal attack? You seem to think that somehow the actions of these two crooks are the bank's fault. That's approving of the entitlement mentality. If you don't like someone pointing that out don't post a liberal opinion
Absolutely. The banks were coerced into making risky loans to un-credit worthy individuals by the federal government by the vastly expanded community redevelopment act. If the banks didn't meet a quota the fed made it difficult for them to borrow. It's the government's fault.
Actually we DO execute people for being criminals., but your comment is irrelevant. I was expressing what I thought SHOULD be done to them, not what I expected WOULD be done. As no doubt you were well aware, but wanted to score some sort of half assed point. Well you didn't
blag blah blah
Banks were not forced to make all the high risk loans they made. They were fighting to make these loans because they were highly profitable.
The same banks which support the leftists causes you claim to hate. All run by the same bank leaders which support Obama.
So why do you support the leftists?
Great googly moogly, why didn’t they just SELL the house when they realized they couldn’t make the payments?
Maryland “Freak State” PING!
Banks were trying to make profits??
No way...
What scammers and evil profit mongers.
I thought they existed for free public use just like a city park?
Profits are fine. They were making bad loans, selling them, and then running.
They knew the loans were high risk and yet promised the buyer they were safe. Then when the music stopped they went to their buddies in govt and got a bailout.
So scammers and evil does describe them well. Do you support fraud?
I can't decide if you really believe this and you're incredibly naive or you're trying to blow pink smoke. The loans are NOT profitable if they're defaulted. That is why prior to the government forcing the banks into making bad risk loans the banks wouldn't make loans to worthless thieves like the two in this article (and btw did you look at the furnishings in the picture?)
So just to clarify your position, you think that these two crooks in this article were forced by the banks into borrowing more than they could afford and never had any intention of paying back, and that the banks consider defaulted loans to be highly profitable?
“The loans are NOT profitable if they’re defaulted. “
If I sell the risk to someone else then it certainly is profitable for me. They made the loans, reaped thousands in closing costs. Then sold the loans AND the risk to someone else. They made a lot of money with no risk.
Who ultimately got stuck with the bad debt? THE TAXPAYER. SO it was the government forcing banks to loan money to irresponsible deadbeats that caused the trouble - the banks were just the instruments that the government used.
Again. Do you think that the banks forced these deadbeats to borrow money they couldn't or more to the point never had any intention of paying back? This is like blaming the gun for the crime. It's the criminal that commits the crime.
The govt did not force the banks to make allthose loans. They made them because they made hundreds of thousands of dollars and shipped all the risk to someone else.
And who facilitated the transfer of that risk? Why the liberals, with heavy financial support from the bank executives.
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