Oh you wouldn't believe some of the stories I've seen. The Fair Isaac people hate me because I would say "Don't do it." on their forums when they had a situation that was much worse than yours.
They have people with barely any money coming there after a bankruptcy with a 598 FICO score, just completely ruined credit score, barely any money, wondering if anyone will give them a mortgage.
Like their interest rate will be sky high and they will have to pay a lot of PMI and they wonder how to get another loan to make a 2-3% down payment, which is always a sign you can't afford it.
There's people there advising them how to work the system and barely get into a house.
Some mortgage companies started to get sued by the government for ignoring basic financial stability of their customers, but those lawsuits have been inherited by a CFPB that won't act on them and I'm sure that Warren Buffett and FICO and the whole rotten system are happy.
His company was even giving out mortgages on manufactured housing, and up to 18% interest I think to customers with dozens of unpaid bills on their credit report, and sometimes they wouldn't even make four or five payments and end up foreclosed on. I get manufactured is riskier but we used to call 18% a credit card.
I try to avoid his businesses. GEICO is another one. They sent me a letter a while back saying they invested in lower rates in Illinois. I guess when you raise people's rates forty percent in one year and they leave, you invest in lower than 40%?
They said they were raising rates in Illinois because of high losses in 2022, but then they pulled this crap and nobody else got that greedy.
As to why people want mortgages, even very bad ones, social shaming of renting an apartment and rolling with the punches are a holdover from when owning a home wasn't about 40% more expensive overall and sometimes much higher depending on the market. Culture works that way, ideas get ossified and they hold even when the reason no longer exists.
Buffett has a charitable foundation. Sam Waterston in Law and Order once said that today's philanthropist is yesterday's robber baron, only that's not true. They never stop being robber barons and they use their foundation to get richer while they "give it away".
That mortgage interest tax credit may not even save people money. It's giving the industry perverse incentives to get greedier.
Now they want to do
fifty year mortgages which are basically renting an apartment with extra steps but making it more difficult to move. And the only reason to do that is lower the monthly payment and deduct the interest which is nearly all of it, then the bank always gets it back eventually. I doubt any of them will want to do these on new construction. But older homes were built well enough.
The banks don't really need taxpayer sweeteners, what they need is a nice swift kick in the pants.
I'm all for the SALT cap to be increased, a lot. It would benefit homeowners but it would draw attention to housing affordability because of the agent wants to talk about where to save on your federal income tax it would force them to point out property taxes, home repairs. Things people don't think about.
Once people confront that issue they may go look at trends to see if the local government has been trending the taxes upward and how fast. They get rolled into the mortgage and basically so does homeowner's insurance, so it's a horrible thing to tell people you sign today and your mortgage never goes up because technically it does.
They'll force you to pay it or force it onto the mortgage, and so significant components can go up 20-50% in a single year sometimes lately and you're in default if you don't pay.
It's like signing a car loan lately where if you drop your full coverage they force place it and then you don't necessarily get the best deal.
FICO Forums is kind of a nasty and ridiculous place. I've seen 20 year olds go there saying they have a Canadian girlfriend with no green card that wants them to buy a Disney timeshare. People do dumb things with money, a lot.
This guy was talking like he needed a deprogrammer, about "cast members" in Disney costumes selling him a timeshare. It sounded like a screening of Fantasia while drinking hallucinogenic tea and undergoing the Ludovico Technique from A Clockwork Orange or something.
Timeshares are one of the worst, if not the worst, financial decisions out there. They chased my grandmother down and sued her in the nursing home, while she's in there with dementia and in her 90s, over something she signed over 50 years ago for a "partial ownership" in a cabin in Tennessee when my grandfather was alive.
but part of our ability to do what we did was that mort. tax deduction.
