No consequences

 Due to a new law in New York no one can be evicted nor have any negative acts taken against them, even including a negative credit entry, for failing to pay rent or mortgage payments. This law applies to all rents and payments due until May 1, 2021. The law, according to officials, doesn't absolve people from the debt, merely places it "on pause." So how exactly can a landlord extract payment if eviction and negative credit reporting is off the table?

So tell me why on earth would anyone in New York pay rent for the next six months? Your average NYC apartment rents for $3,000 or more per month, meaning that New York's landlords are on the hook for $20,000 or more for EACH rental property that they own. 

This is all a part of the Socialists using COVID as an excuse to extract themselves some wealth redistribution. 

Redesign

My wife was just notified that the school where she works is moving in three years. They are building a new school, which will be 20 minutes further from our house. She wants to move to an area that is closer to her job.

The funny thing is that although this new school is also further from my school, it is a shorter commute.

We won't have to sell our current house, and will be able to add another rental to our business, one that has no mortgage.

So I am onboard. This will be the first house that I have had built. Ever.

I told her that I would like some design features added to our home. The wife and I are currently discussing adding some features. I want to make the place more secure without making it look like a fortress. Maybe some nice looking planters in front. See if I can get the walls for the master closet made of sturdy enough material to make it a safe room. I am not sure what it will be, but I want to see what we is possible for what we can afford.

We have two years to plan before we have to start construction, so there is plenty of time.

Blogiversary

Today is the anniversary of the first post of this blog, July 11, 2007. In the 4,749 days since then, I have posted 2,561 times. So much has happened since that first post. The entire Obama administration came and went. This blog has seen me through three Presidents, 3 careers, four address changes,  two wives, a bankruptcy, the birth of two grandchildren, and more changes than I care to think about.

Personally, my life has seen a lot of changes. Married and then divorced, and then married again. Employed, retired, then employed again. I declared bankruptcy and then became a millionaire.
In 2008 I got married.
In 2009 the bottom dropped out of the housing market, my pay was cut by 30% and, faced with a depreciating asset, I declared bankruptcy with the intent of giving the house back to the bank.
In 2010 My bankruptcy was discharged. The mortgage bank was caught lying to the court with regard to my bankruptcy. They were forced to pay me nearly $10,000. Then they were caught forging mortgage paperwork in my case and several dozen others. Their lawyer was disbarred and they had to pay me more than $25,000 in damages.
In 2011 My wife announced to me (during the week of my birthday, no less) that she wanted a divorce. That divorce became final in June. I retired from my career as a firemedic and began school to be a physician assistant.
In 2012 I decided to leave school, moved back to Florida, and began teaching adult education while remaining mostly retired.
In 2014, I met my current wife. I also applied for my teacher's license and became a high school science teacher.
In 2018, I finally got paid for a job I did for the Feds six years before and I was able to pay off my house, all of my bills, and put a sizable amount in savings.

When this blog began, if you had told me that 13 years later I would no longer be a firefighter and would instead be teaching high school science, I would have called you crazy. Thirteen years is ancient for a blog, and while mine is not as widely read as some, I write mostly to keep me happy and give me a place to get out the things that I would like to say. The fact that some people care to read them is a humbling bonus.

Thank you to each and every one of you who read my ramblings.

Communism

The far left wing of the US Congress is taking up the cause of #CancelRent. Ilhan Omar introduced the Rent and Mortgage Cancellation Act, which would relieve tenants of their obligation to pay rent, transfer mortgages to the federal government, and allow landlords to recoup their rent costs — but only if they agree to a vast new regulatory program that includes a rent freeze and the inability to collect back payments.

What would the program look like?

No tenants will have to pay rent for the duration of the COVID 19 suspension period, which is defined as beginning April 1, 2020 and ending 30 days after the termination of the FEMA state of emergency. During this period, the landlord cannot:

1. charge the tenant penalties for late or nonpayment of rent
2. NEVER force the tenant to repay any money owed to the landlord. 
3. report the tenant's nonpayment to any credit reporting agency. 

The same would apply to banks and mortgages.

A landlord who violates this can be sued by the tenant up to two years later, plus $5,000 for the first violation, $10,000 for the second, and for $50,000 to forfeiture of the property for the third violation.

Believe it or not, that is not the worst part of the bill. Now we get to the good part:

Landlords and mortgage holders can apply to the Feds to be reimbursed for the loss of income. In order to apply, the applicant must sign an agreement stating that, for the next five years:

1. Rent cannot be increased (if interest rates, taxes, or other costs increase, the landlord eats it)
2. Tenants can only be evicted for cause with written advanced notice
3. Tenants cannot be denied because of the source of their income, sexual orientation, gender identity, criminal record, credit history, or immigration status.
4. If the rental unit is vacant, the landlord must make the unit available for rental to people receiving public assistance.
5. If, at the end of the 5 year period, a tenant owes the landlord money, the landlord is not permitted to collect that money. (if they trash the place, the landlord eats the cost of repairs)
6. Landlords may not retaliate in any way against a tenant for any reason, including reporting to credit reporting agencies or fines. 
7. HUD must be notified 60 days before you sell the property, and gets first right of refusal AND even if HUD decides not to purchase the property, HUD will notify eligible purchasers in the area that the property is for sale, and still gets to decide who is eligible to buy the property and the amount that it will sell for. 

Even after signing the agreement, there is no guarantee that a landlord will be reimbursed. The fund has a fixed amount of money available, and priority of payment is to nonprofit organizations. If you do get reimbursed and are found to have violated any of the above conditions, you must return 100% of the assistance you received, and are still subject to being sued.

Make no mistake, this will DESTROY real estate in this country. Without credit checks or credit reporting, there is no way to ensure that you are renting to a person who will pay. If they don't pay or destroy the place by setting up a meth lab, the landlord has no recourse.

Since banks could not discriminate by using credit or criminal history, the risks would simply be too high, and mortgage lending would come to a halt. Combined with the fact that HUD would get to decide who buys every house and for how much, there is no way for anyone to sell property. Housing values would plummet.

Most mom and pop landlords would be ruined. We bought our rentals by personally guaranteeing the loans. With no way to collect rent, no way to sell, and no escape from bankruptcy, anyone invested in real estate would be ruined.

I can't even

I just got in an online argument with a group of people over this proposal:

There are about 40 million people in the workforce who are susceptible to COVID 19 by either being over 50 years old or having a preexisting medical condition. We should give each of them 1 million dollars to retire, subject to the following restrictions:
1 They can no longer work.
2 They must buy an American car
3 They must buy a house cash or pay the mortgage off for whatever house they already own.
This would fix everything by allowing people to return to work and simultaneously fix the labor force by eliminating debt and unemployment. 

My reply was that this was stupid, and anyone who endorsed it obviously didn't understand basic mathematics or economics. First, it would cost 40 TRILLION dollars to pay those 40 million people a million each. Second, there are only 15 trillion dollars in existence, so this payment would be more money than actually exists.


I was laughed at and called ridiculous. The people who called me ridiculous fell into two camps:

1 Paying 40 million people a million dollars each would only cost 40 billion dollars, less than the cost of an aircraft carrier.

2 There is no limit to the number of dollars that exist. You just add it to bank accounts on the computer, it isn't like they actually have to PRINT the money in today's day and age.


Sigh. I left the discussion. I just don't have time to explain the ways that they are wrong. 

The Fifth Amendment, takings, and COVID

The Florida governor issued a 2 page executive order (pdf warning) that reads (in pertinent part):

Section 2. I hereby suspend and toll any statute providing for an eviction cause of action under Florida law solely as it relates to non-payment of rent by residential tenants due to the COVID-19 emergency for 45 days from the date of this Executive Order, including any extensions.

Section 3. Nothing in this Executive Order shall be construed as relieving an individual from their obligation to make mortgage payments or rent payments. 

The counties are interpreting this order to mean that NO evictions are permitted and are refusing to even serve process on any eviction cases whatsoever.

Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings explained that the county is following that order.
“Evictions can’t be processed further by the clerk or served by the sheriff. What I’m saying to you is, there is no mechanism to evict people in the state of Florida. That won’t last forever, those property owners will be able to get their money,” Demings said.

So if I have a tenant that is destroying my property, I can't even have them evicted, even though the governor's order only prohibits evictions for nonpayment. So let's say that this order gets extended for another 30 days, which is likely. Now landlords are going to potentially miss out on months of income. Once they evict their tenant, the landlord will likely never see the money that they are owed.

While it seems like a kind gesture, remember that landlords have expenses, too. As soon as the government requires that one person provide something to someone else without recompense, you have established slavery. This is, IMO, a violation of the 5th Amendment's takings clause. You have deprived that land owner of the use of his own property for public use (controlling the pandemic) without reimbursement.

Demings, a Democrat, is married to US Representative Val Demings. She is most famous around these parts for losing her duty firearm in 2009 by leaving it in her unlocked patrol vehicle while serving as the Sheriff of Orange County. As the Sheriff, she punished herself by sending herself a strongly worded letter.

Democrats love three things:
1 Socialism
2 Gun Control
3 Exempting themselves from 1 and 2

What disappoints me is that the Governor is issuing these orders. I am fully upset with those who downplay  the threat posed by the Wuhan virus, but the threat of tyranny is far greater.

Blogiversary

Today marks the eleventh birthday of this blog. So much has happened since that first post. The entire Obama administration came and went. Personally, my life has seen a lot of changes. Married and then divorced, and then married again. Employed to retired to employed again. I declared bankruptcy and then became a millionaire.
In 2008 I got married.
In 2009 the bottom dropped out of the housing market, my pay was cut by 30% and, faced with a depreciating asset, I declared bankruptcy with the intent of giving the house back to the bank.
In 2010 My bankruptcy was discharged. The mortgage bank was caught lying to the court with regard to my bankruptcy. They were forced to pay me nearly $10,000. Then they were caught forging mortgage paperwork. Their lawyer was disbarred and they had to pay me more than $25,000 in damages.
In 2011 My wife announced to me (during the week of my birthday, no less) that she wanted a divorce. That divorce became final in June. I retired from my career as a firemedic and began school to be a physician assistant.
In 2012 I decided to leave school, moved back to Florida, and began teaching adult education.
In 2014, I met my current wife. I also applied for my teacher's license and became a high school science teacher.
In 2018, I finally got paid for a job I did for the Feds six years before and I was able to pay off my house, all of my bills, and put a sizable amount in savings. With a 7 figure net worth, my wife and I now work so we can afford luxuries and not because we need to.

A lot can happen in 11 years.

The banks in general

I am still answering the poster on my previous post about my mortgage mess. You may or may not be interested, but I am locking replies to that post.

The banks were not required to loan to the poor. That is a talking point that was written to make the banks look like the victims and not the architects of the mortgage loan bubble. If there is no dispute, can you point to any evidence that this ever happened? Or is it pure conjecture?

The fact is that Phil Gram was key in passing the Commodity Futures modernization Act of 2000, which PROHIBITED the government from interfering in those transactions.

The root of the banking bubble was the Gram Leach Bliley act of 1999. It was sponsored by three Republican Congressmen, and enabled banks to invest in real estate, something that had been illegal since the great depression, when banks losing gobs of cash in the real estate market triggered the depression. The architect of the Gram Leech Bliley act was Clinton's Treasury Secretary, who left the administration after the act passed, and became an executive at Citigroup, being paid over $17 million. Gram left Congress and wound up as an executive at UBS.

 Before these two laws were passed, all of these loans were regulated and the trading of mortgages was public record, as they were required to be recorded at the county courthouse. The banks had a plan for that, too. They created a private records database called MERS that was out of the view of the public and government regulators. This allowed the banks to trade in mortgages without those pesky laws covering public records allowing the citizens to see what was really going on.

Once the safeguards were eliminated, this allowed the main part of the plan to come together: Banks were able to make high risk loans to people who could not afford to repay them, and securing those with mortgages on property that was worth far less than what the loans were worth, in effect making them unsecured. They did this by using appraisers who would say the homes were worth whatever they needed to be for the loan to look legitimate.

Then the banks bundled those loans into mortgage backed securities that were rated as AAA investments, and sold off to institutional investors- the retirement and pension funds of the American workers. When those loans began to fail, the funds crashed and the banks, through their Republican and TEA party friends, blamed the pensions of the workers, and screamed that they (the banks) were about to fail, and collected nearly $2 trillion in taxpayer funded bailout cash. Over $1.6 billion of that bailout cash was used to paid bonuses to bank executives for pulling off the largest transfer of wealth in human history.

Mortgage scam

There are a few misconceptions in the comments to my last post, so I thought I would clear them up. See, I used to believe that the homeowners were just as much at fault as the banks. Maybe some of them are, but I have come to believe that the majority of them were defrauded by the banks. Let me explain:

I bought a house in the early part of 2007, right at the center of the housing bubble, although I didn't at the time know it was a bubble. I paid about $250,00 for a house. This was not outrageous, as I was making $85,000 a year at the time. I could easily afford the payments, so I was not being greedy, nor did I have any intent to defraud anyone. Later that year, the bubble burst. Within 2 years, my house was worth less than half of that amount.

At the same time, many other homes in the area saw declining value, meaning that the taxes paid on those homes decreased to the point where the Fire Department began closing stations for the day, rather than pay firefighters to staff them. This caused me to take a 25% cut in pay. I tried to work a deal with the bank, they refused.

Stuck with a depreciating asset and declining wages, I took the only viable option available: I filed bankruptcy. For those who are not familiar with it, Chapter 7 is not some painless process where you get to walk away from debts, no questions asked. There is a means test, where the court investigates your income. Then there are hearings where your creditors, the Trustee, and the Bankruptcy Judge try to liquidate your assets to pay your creditors. The Federally appointed Trustee gets a commission for any assets that he finds, so he is motivated. After all of this, you lose pretty much everything you own. Certainly nor painless.

It was during these hearings that my Original Mortgage holder lied and claimed that they still owned the mortgage and the note. THEY committed fraud, in that they lied IN COURT in order to make money. When I discovered that, I began doing research. I sued them, and they paid me nearly ten grand to drop the case.

Then they tried to foreclose. It turns out that they were not the owners of the note and mortgage. They tried to falsify the papers, and their lawyer was disbarred. He wound up fleeing the country with gobs of stolen cash. The foreclosure was dismissed.

This was all a scheme by the banks to get money using the government and a major fraud scheme. They lied and overvalued houses in order to make loans for FAR more than the homes were worth, to people who couldn't afford, nor qualify for them. The sold those soon to fail loans to investors, most of whom were pension plans and 401k retirement funds. hundreds of billions of dollars in the form of retirement nest eggs disappeared overnight.

The conservative talking point is that all of this was caused by a requirement for banks to lend to low income recipients. That is false. It was a bipartisan payoff where key members of both parties were paid off to change key laws and help the banks rake in profits.

With all of that, don't lecture me about moral obligations.

The end of my mortgage story

For those of you who are not familiar with the story of my mortgage, here is the tl;dr version:

I had a house that lost two thirds of its value in the real estate crash. With no other way to stop the bleeding, I declared bankruptcy and was going to turn the house over to the bank. The bank testified to the bankruptcy court that they were the owner of the note and the mortgage, but were lying. They had sold the note and mortgage to Fannie Mae two years earlier.

I sued them for fraud and we settled out of court for almost $10,000. The mortgage holder that wasn't then sold the note and mortgage again, this time to Nationstar mortgage. They recorded the sale in the county clerk's office. At this point, there were at least four different entities that had claims to this mortgage: MERS, Nationstar, Fannie Mae, and the originating bank.

Then the originating bank tried to foreclose. The foreclosure was dismissed, and Nationstar claimed to not have any record of owning the mortgage.

The feds stepped in and sued the banks. I got another $4,000 in THAT lawsuit.

The originating bank continued to send me demands for payment, even though prohibited from doing so by the bankruptcy court, and the fact that they no longer own the note and mortgage. So after a few years of this, I got tired of it and sued several more times over the next few years. I wound up getting another $25,000 in damages from those suits.

Then, with only a month left until the statute of limitations was to kick in, the original bank filed papers transferring the mortgage from NationStar and Fannie Mae back to themselves. The only problem was that I had letters from both of them saying that they had no knowledge of these transfers.

The original bank then filed for foreclosure, claiming that they had lost the original note and mortgage, but (trust us, they said) we are entitled to foreclose.

I was all set to fight them in court. I had proof that they were lying, and I was going to keep the house. If I won, the statute of limitations would have passed, and the house would have been mine to keep.

They got a federal judge to rule that the bank's lying was immaterial, because I had declared bankruptcy. A person who has declared bankruptcy, he wrote, cannot fight lawsuits from creditors, even ones who were only creditors because of their own fraudulent activity and statements, without undoing the bankruptcy. I was told by the judge's staff that he wasn't about to give away free houses. This would have exposed me to my old debts, along with 5 years of interest and penalties. I had to give in, and they got the house.

At least they have finally left me alone, paid me a total of about $50,0000, and I got to live in that house for five years, rent free. Still, they committed fraud and got away with it.

Don't feel sorry for the banks. They made hundreds of billions of dollars.

This is why a communist can run for office

Anyone singing the "Happy Birthday Song" over the past 66 years was forced to pay royalties to the Warner/Chappell music company, who was making an average of about $2 million each year from the royalties for the song. 

The company finally admitted in court that they never owned the song and agreed to pay the artists suing them $14 million in a settlement. That's right, they committed fraud that got them over $100 million in profits, and in the end had to only pay out around $14 million to settle the claims.

The banks, who made well over $1 trillion in profits by engaging in illegal mortgage securities fraud and thereby collapsed the US economy, which was followed up by the government bailing them out with ANOTHER trillion dollars, were forced to pay back a mere $13 billion in settlements. Goldman Sachs, who made the whole scheme work by selling the worthless loans as mortgage backed securities, had to pay back a mere $5 billion.

It seems as though companies are committing wholesale fraud and paying pennies on the dollar when they get caught. This is one of the reasons why so many people are so unhappy with our government, and I am betting it is a big reason why Sanders has such a large following.

Judges

Nearly six years ago, I found myself in some financial trouble because of the housing crash. I filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, and agreed to surrender the house to the mortgage holder. I figured that I would be out of there within six months. I'm still in the house, but my entire financial future is in jeopardy, because judges are ruling on what they think the law should be, rather than what it says.

It turned out that the bank who was claiming to be the mortgage holder was not, in fact, the holder of the mortgage. I asked for sanctions, and the bank settled out of court for just under 5 figures.

The bank opened a foreclosure case, which was then dismissed a year and a half later because their attorney never pursued the case, after he was caught manufacturing evidence and was subsequently disbarred. The bank was caught in their fraud by the Feds and had to pay me another $4K in a settlement. The mortgage was then sold to another bank.

That bank didn't do anything with the mortgage for over three years.  In May of 2015, more than 5 years after the conclusion of my bankruptcy, a judge in Tampa came down with a ruling that says people who file bankruptcy cannot defend themselves against foreclosures, and if they do, the court will retroactively void their bankruptcy.

As soon as they heard this, the original bank bought the mortgage back, and again filed suit for foreclosure. As soon as I was served, I hired an attorney. Now the bank is threatening to get this judge to retroactively void my bankruptcy by claiming that I am stalling the process. even though it is their own fault that the house has not been foreclosed upon: they are the ones who committed fraud, their attorneys are the ones who were disbarred, and they are the ones who sat on their hands for over 5 years without pursuing the case.


The judiciary is out of control.

Mortgage bank again

Today is an important day. I have been in a four year fight with SunTrust. It seems like they will never learn. The lawsuit that I filed against them in December has been settled. Although the exact terms of the settlement are confidential, I can say that I received a 5 figure settlement. That is the second time that they have paid me 5 figures within the past year. In the settlement, I agreed to hold them harmless for everything that they had done as of the date of the settlement.

The day after the settlement was signed, they again violated the court's order. I am going to wait a couple of months for them to do it a few more times, and I will sue them again. Sooner or later, they will get the message.

Law change will cost you

As of today, the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act expires, as it was not renewed by Congress. This is a HUGE problem for underwater homeowners. Let me explain:

Underwater homeowners often try to negotiate with their bank so that they can sell their homes for less than they owe in a short sale or have their mortgage balance reduced. But the difference between what the homeowner owes and the lower sales price approved by the bank is considered income for the homeowner and subject to tax by the Internal Revenue Service.

For example, someone with a $100,000 mortgage who is allowed to sell their house for $80,000 is supposed to pay taxes on the remaining $20,000.

But the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act saved such homeowners from the tax burden. Last year, Congress rushed to extend the law during negotiations about the fiscal cliff but only through the end of 2013.

They did not do so this year. This means that the IRS will consider a short sale to be INCOME, even though the homeowner took a loss in selling his home for less than what he paid for it.

So let's say that you borrowed $240,000 for your home in 2007. The bank allows you to short sell it in 2014, and you get $100,000. That $140,000 difference will count as income, and if you are married and each earn around $45,000 a year, you are now considered subject to the taxes that the evil rich must pay. Your tax bill will be about $45,000 higher than it otherwise would.

Hope this doesn't keep you up at night.

Mortgage

Even though SunTrust Mortgage has paid me money for damages 4 times over the past four years (once in 2010, once in 2012, and two times this year already) for trying to collect on a mortgage when they don't even have a mortgage on my home, they have continued to send people to my door, call me, send bills, and threaten foreclosure. To date, they have directly or indirectly paid me nearly $40,000, in addition to the fact that I have lived in this house for over 4 years without making a house payment.
Why? Because they got greedy, and were a part of the nationwide banking scam that committed fraud on an unprecedented scale and was responsible for the largest transfer of wealth in human history.

 SunTrust Mortgage has sent me a dozen letters and sent 7 collectors to my house since the last lawsuit concluded in July.

As a result, I filed my third lawsuit in the past year against them this morning. I can't help but wonder how many times we have go through this before they realize that they should leave me alone. I am sure that the judge is tired of them as well.

Continuing Shenanigans

For those just joining us:
I had a house that lost its value in the real estate crash. I declared bankruptcy, and was going to turn the house over to the bank. The bank testified in court that they were the owner of the note and the mortgage, but I caught them lying. They had sold the note and mortgage to Fannie Mae, two year earlier. I sued, and we settled out of court for almost 10 grand. They then sold the note and mortgage again, this time to Nationstar mortgage. They recorded the sale in the county clerk's office.

Then SunTrust tried to foreclose. The foreclosure was dismissed, and Nationstar claimed to not have any record of owning the mortgage.

The feds stepped in and sued the banks. I got another $4,000 in THAT lawsuit.

SunTrust continued to send me demands for payment, even though prohibited from doing so by the bankruptcy court, and the fact that they no longer own the note and mortgage. So after a few years of this, I got tired of it and sued again in May of this year (the hearing was in June). This time, the court awarded me $14,700 and instructed SunTrust to have no further contact with me.

The next day, SunTrust began sending letters and leaving notes on my door. Since that court date in June, I have gotten 2 letters, 5 notes on my door, and two phone calls.

Today, I get a letter from SunTrust, telling me that they have sold my note and mortgage, and effective October 1, 2013, I should send my payments to yet another bank. I am thinking that this is going to be my new career.

Bankruptcy is supposed to allow you to start over. It has been four years, and this bank STILL will not leave me alone.

Foreclosure scams

A new chapter in the Florida foreclosure mess has opened, as real estate scammers are renting out homes that are to be foreclosed, by posing as the home's owner. In this case, a pair of cops were arrested for the scheme. This is possible, because it takes years to foreclose a home, thanks to the criminal activity of the banks themselves.

People who are caught up in the fraudulent foreclosure system, where the banks gave loans to people that they knew couldn't afford them, so that those people could buy homes that were selling for far more than they were worth. The banks then paid appraisers to overstate the homes' value, and sold the loans off to investors before the first payment was due by calling them mortgage backed securities. The securities were rated as top notch investments by ratings firms, even though they were subprime loans. They created a company called "MERS" to aid in obscuring the fraud by taking mortgage transfers out of the public record and hiding them in a maze of private files.

The homebuyers soon defaulted, crashing the economy, and the entire deck of cards collapsed. The banks moved to foreclose, but had destroyed the paperwork. A savvy lawyer working in Jacksonville discovered the lack of notes and mortgages, and people began fighting the foreclosures. The banks responded by "creating" and forging paperwork. Banks were reportedly calling this the "art department."

They got caught, and lost quite a bit of money. In February of 2012, several banks came to a settlement with the federal government, where the banks paid $25 billion for wrongfully foreclosing on people's homes. The agreement settles state and federal investigations finding that the country’s five largest mortgage servicers routinely signed foreclosure related documents outside the presence of a notary public and without really knowing whether the facts they contained were correct.  Both of these practices violate the law. Federal and state governments received the lion's share of the money, and only $1.5 billion went to reimburse the people whose homes were stolen through this fraud. The politicians are bought and paid for. Of course, the homeowners are still able to pursue their own court actions.

This had the effect of slowing the foreclosure process, because in many cases, the banks cannot prove that the homeowner owes them any money. So now the other scammers move in: people are posing as the homeowner of vacant homes (sometimes the banks themselves), and are renting them out and pocketing the money. It is an added slap in the face that some of the criminals doing this are also the very police that are supposed to prevent that sort of thing.
 

Shenanigans

For those that have been following this blog, you know that I bought a home in 2007 for $240,000. In 2009, I realized that I was having my financial life ruined by my possession of a depreciating asset. My home was worth less than half of what I had paid for it. I decided to cut my losses and declare bankruptcy and give the house back to the bank.
The problem is that the bank I borrowed the purchase money from, and had been making payments to, was not the owner of the note and mortgage, even though they had testified in bankruptcy court that they were. Not only that, but they continued to try and collect money from me, even though the debt had been discharged in the bankruptcy. They left notes on my door asking me to call them. I would call,  and they would ask me to pay. They would mail bills to me. Since this isn't allowed after a bankruptcy, I sued them, and we settled out of court. They paid me a large sum of money to drop the case. 
They tried to foreclose on the house, but could not, because they don't own the mortgage. The foreclosure was dismissed.
They were one of the banks that the government was investigating for forging legal documents. As a result of that, I was paid another $4,000 in a settlement.
They continued to badger me for money for two more years, so I sued them again two months ago. I won another $14,700 from them. The judge also ordered them to have no contact with me. The day after we went to court, I found a note on my door just after lunch, asking me to call them. The day after that, I got a letter demanding money.
I guess we are going to give them some time to violate the court's order a some more, and then we will be going back to court.
So far:
I've been living in this house for free for four years.
They have paid my property taxes for the last 4 years, even though they are not the mortgage holder, and I did not ask them to pay them.
They have paid me approximately $30,000 in settlements and sanctions.

and yet, they continue to break the law and violate the court's orders

Banks screwing up

For those who may not remember or are new to this blog, I was swept up in the mortgage mess that started our economic downturn. You can read about the summary here. I declared bankruptcy in 2009 as a result. My mortgage bank lied and provided false documents in court, and I was able to prove it. I sued them in Federal Court, and we settled out of court for $7,500. They paid me to go away. Then, in June of 2011, I won the foreclosure case after a year and a half of acting as my own attorney as I fought it in court.

Because no one knows who owns the mortgage, there are three different entities who have a potential claim:

1 The original bank. (Let's call them Mortgage Trust Company) They are the ones that I beat in court. They claimed to own my mortgage, sold it, filed the assignment with the courthouse, but still claim to be the mortgage holder.
2 Fannie Mae (FNMA) They also claim to be the owner, and they claim that Mortgage Trust Company is acting on their behalf. Like Mortgage Trust Company, they cannot produce a single document to show that they are the owners of the note or mortgage.
3 Nationstar mortgage. There is a recorded document at the courthouse that names Nationstar as the mortgage holder, and it is signed by Mortgage Trust Company's agent, MERS. The problem here is that Nationstar has no record of this.

Clear as mud? So last year, they started trying to collect money again. So, last month, I filed another lawsuit in Federal Court. This time, I was able to get an attorney. Let's see how much money we get this time.

I am not alone. In Florida, the banks are still lying and committing fraud to steal people's homes. This needs to stop, but I am not counting on our corrupt government to stop it. This family has been messing with it for two years:

Nothing new here

Many on the right are blasting the recent ruling on Obama care, stating that the government has this supposedly new power to compel you to do things by using taxes as an incentive. As if taxing people if they do not buy things is a new phenomenon, or some new concept. The fact is, this has been going on for decades.
Buy a house, or you pay more in income taxes, because people who rent cannot deduct mortgage interest, nor can they deduct the property taxes that are paid as a part of the rent.
Buy energy efficient appliances, get a tax deduction.
Buy an energy efficient car, get a tax deduction.
Obtain an expensive college education, get a tax deduction.
Do with a student loan, deduct the interest.


Or are you pulling a switcheroo by claiming that a deduction on your taxes for buying something is any different from an addition to your taxes by not buying something? That is the same logic that a business uses when they are prohibited by law from charging extra for customers who pay by credit card, so they give a discount for cash.

Then there are the taxes that are designed to punish you for buying products, instead of not buying them:
Taxes on tobacco, alcohol, luxury goods, gasoline, tanning beds, certain foods, cars, and on and on. There are even taxes that increase with income, designed to punish you for being successful.

There is nothing new here, and you are fooling yourself if you think that the SCOTUS has changed anything with this ruling.

That doesn't mean that I am in favor of Obamacare. What it means is that I have long ago come to the understanding that taxes in this country only provide about 65% of what the government spends, and are used more for behavior modification than they are for revenue generation.