Easy. Just follow this simple 12-step program:

Step 1: Buy house for 2x what it cost a few years ago.
Step 2: Go to gas station and fill up your hummer.
Step 3: Tell friends how cheap your ARM loan is and convince them to get rid of their expensive fixed rates.
Step 4: After one year, draw out all your appreciation equity. Brag to friends about how rich you are.
Step 5: Hear from from bank your home equity line of credit is cut off due to house price depreciation.
Step 6: Lose job.
Step 7: To lift depression, charge the last $250 remaining on credit card for expensive meal at El Gaucho. (Important: don’t leave a tip. You’ll need this money for gas to get home.)
Step 8: In an act of sheer desperation, ask El Gaucho valet manager for help putting your life back together.
Step 9: Go to gas station, put the last $15 remaining on your credit card in hummer gas tank. (Important: Drive back roads so auto repo-man doesn’t spot you. Park in locked garage when you get home.)
Step 10: After bank fails to renegotiate, take valet manager’s 2nd piece of advice and apply for food stamps.
Step 11: Hide when friends knock on door in an attempt to figure out where you’ve been the last few months. (Important: Don’t return answering machine messages.)
Step 12: Get George Bush tax refund for $600.00. Fill up hummer. Go to friends house and brag about how good you’re doing. (Important: Park hummer in friend’s garage in case auto repo-man is following you.)

I love reading about distressed elderly people…It makes me feel better about living in my crappy apartment…

It’s been a terrible year for 84-year-old Everlena Joplin. In January, her great-grandson was killed in a gang-related shooting. Now she fears she could lose her Central District home.

AL YOU ARE A JERK.

Why not learn a skill and earn an honest living for a change?

Yes, scumbag RE industry “professionals” may have lured some in and lied to “make the sale”, but nobody had a gun to the buyer’s heads as they signed on the dotted line while dreaming of SS appliances and granite countertops.

A lot of people who thought could afford the lifestyle of someone making 200K will soon realize that they….cannot.

Nope, wasn’t at his April show. Last one I went to (besides tonight and last year’s PAX) was in November I think, at Triple Door.

Please give to the starving loan originator’s fund. In the not too distant past, they could loan themselves money and were living the good life, driving around in Ferraris. Now, they can’t even borrow a cup of sugar from their neighbor, because their neighbor’s house has been foreclosed on. You too can help the starving loan originators.

It’s been a terrible year for 84-year-old Everlena Joplin. In January, her great-grandson was killed in a gang-related shooting. Now she fears she could lose her Central District home.

Al, the retirees are among the most screwed during this economic cycle. Low interest rates, rising food and energy costs, rising (low end) rents and falling property values. The only area where they aren’t feeling the pinch is in income growth – only because they don’t work.

Great society we’ve fostered here.

This should be pretty easy rather soon.

All we’ll have to do watch the rise in min down (3.5%) FHA loans that are originated from 2008 forward. As home prices continue to flatten out and go down in WA State more of those FHA homebuyers will be underwater

I’m with Jillayne @ #7.

I think you misplaced the quotes in your title. It should have read:

Desperate Homeowners ”Overwhelm” Local Counselors

Fifty calls per week? Call the national guard. Bit of shoddy reporting on the part of KING 5, if you ask me.

It’s been a terrible year for 84-year-old Everlena Joplin. In January, her great-grandson was killed in a gang-related shooting. Now she fears she could lose her Central District home.

What kind of loans did these choads get themselves into?

The people who are typically facing calamity due to resets usually have mortgages which allowed them to make VERY low payments for a while before full amortization kicked in. For example, if the going 30 year fixed rate was 6%, you could get a loan that allowed you to only make payments based on 3% for 2 years after which time the interest rate you needed to pay would rise to 8% (to help makeup for the money you weren’t paying during the first 2 years of low payments).

These loans are great for people who can’t really afford payments for the full interest rate. It allows them to get into a home for a low price, and pray that the prices appreciate significantly during the early low rate period, which would allow them to refinance into a better conventional mortgage or sell and make a bundle before the payments reset.

Or maybe buyers in the Island County typically put 30% or 40% down.

I don’t get this – when my rate adjusts next year it is likely to result in an unchanged payment if not lower at 1 year LIBOR +2

What kind of loans did these choads get themselves into?

It would be interesting to see just how many home-owners have 5% or less equity. Although places like Bellevue and Redmond seem to show a relatively small number of equity poor home-owners, I wonder how many are on the brink (i.e. will wind up with negative equity with a further 5% or 10% price decline)?

One year ago when I was in line at Safeway I was disgusted listening to a checkout girl talk to a customer about how she got a 450K no-doc loan. Now I am not sure, but I may be even more disgusted at customers at El Gaucho talking about their impending foreclosure after eating a >$200 meal.

Basically though…I am disgusted.

Thus, the real question we need to look at is this: what percentage of Puget Sound home-owners have little or no equity? It would be particularly interesting to see how this has trended over time (i.e. is there a lower percentage of Puget Sound home-owners with no equity today than in the ’80s?).

Considering a 8 hour day, spending an hour on the phone with each person, they’d need only 3 people working full time to handle these calls…..unless they’re on the phone for way longer than 1 hour. Even double the time spent on the phone and I fail to see how the agency could be “overwhelmed.”

Governor Gregoire just gave the housing counseling agencies 1.5 million of our tax dollars from the rainy day fund a few months ago.

I’d like an accounting as to how that money is being spent.

KING 5TV, can you get on this story, please? We bloggers have other full time jobs. Thank you.

I’d like a reporter to interview someone from EACH of the housing counseling agencies.

I fully expect to see all agencies rise to the occasion of being able to handle the onslaught of all the EXPECTED PHONE CALLS.

The governor’s 2007 task force report concluded that there WOULD be an increase in calls…..and we gave the agencies resources to handle it.

Now give US a report on how that worked.

If the agencies can’t “handle” it, then there sure are several hundred thousand starving loan originators who are going to swoop in and collect up front fees from these homeowners with promises of getting loan mods.

These are the thousands of people that were told “this is the best time to buy”. These are the people “experts” are happy they did not pay attention to the national media and did not stay on the “sidelines”.

It’s truly a crime.

Its also time to get this debt crisis controlled ASAP to prevent another Great Depression run on the banks.

Giving the subprime mess organised crime banks “bailout” welfare may delay the inevitable; but in the end, in my opinion, the foreclosures will go forth anyway and the delay “just makes it worse” as today’s bad loans get added into the next wave, then the next wave, etc…

Let’s not be codependent with America’s organised crime bankers, let free enterprise clean up the mess in its own time and much quicker than too, rather than making the debt crisis get worse to temporarily get better, only to get far worse than would if we left it alone.

I suggest tough love.

Bwa ha ha ha ha

the calls must be from Californians pretending to be Washingtonians because all of the California foreclosure resources are swamped */