Most of the news stories on the mortgage lending crisis did a great job at vilifying the lending industry. How dare these businesses trust their customers to keep to the contracts. What were these mortgage lenders thinking? Yes, there were a couple of dishonest businesses but that falls under theft, not money lending. One uses deception, the other uses hope and promise. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is which.
There were many sad stories on people who had their home foreclosed. These people talk about how they bought a house worth several hundreds of thousand of dollars for just pennies a month. What a great deal! At this point, they must have zoned out and missed the lender explaining how their payments would jump in a few years to the point where they would need to win the lottery or sell off a couple of their 2.5 children. Or maybe, these unfortunate home buyers thought the balloon payment part of the contract meant they were to add balloons to the mortgage payment after five years. You would have thought that at least one person would have asked what they had to fill those balloons with.
If history is the sum total of things to be avoided, someone must have forgotten the same mortgage crisis of the 80s. In the end, we survived that spot of history too.
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