In many ways, Shelby Morrow is a typical 16-year-old. She likes hanging out with her friends, dreams of getting her own car and enjoys writing short stories in the bedroom of her wood-frame house in Palm Harbor, Fla.
But in the past few months, she’s been grappling with a financial reality that most teens don’t face. The home she shares with her mother, Melody, and younger sister, Lindsey, is falling into foreclosure. Some days, she watches as her mother cries over the stress.
“I completely understand what’s going on, so I went out and got a job as a server at a nursing home,” Shelby says. “I don’t want to move. Sometimes, I blame my mom for it, but I know it’s not her fault. I’m scared.”
Just remember the joke, for which the punchline is “Women, minorities hardest hit.” It keeps things in perspective.
this is NOT the same thing as “Women, minorities hardest hit.” These kids are suffering at the hands of their parents who got greedy trying to buy expensive homes with these crazy sub prime mortgages. Predicatably, some of the parents are divorcing, to add insult to injury.
These dovetails with the article posted yesterday about kids having little knowledge or appreciation of civics, history, current events, etc. http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article/14061/
whoops “this” not “these”
A friend of mine found himself working for a time for one of the mortgage companies that has been behind the sub-prime crisis, and spent many months seeking a new position when he discovered what was expected of him. His task was, in effect, to persuade people to take mortgages that he knew and they knew they couldn’t afford.
The home-buyers who got themselves into this mess certainly must take responsibility for their actions, but often the companies selling these loans were colluding with them, and clearly there were some individuals who headed those companies who walked away with a small mint of ill-gotten gains.
I read both the story here in USA Today and the one about pets as the victims of foreclosures that is imbedded in it, and the two wrung my heart out. It makes my inability to sell my home in the USA due to the crisis in the housing market caused by the sub-prime crisis and all that has followed from it seem small potatoes.
FWIW, Suntrust Mortgage is predicting that the Atlanta real estate market is currently at bottom and recovery will be finished, absent any intervening factors, in eighteen months. The national recovery will follow a months later.
Anecdotal evidence is all very well and good, but the reality of who has been hit hardest is quite different from those described in the article.
Both sides of this foreclosure crisis borrowers and crafty bankers must share the blame for this banking crisis. And they both will feel the heat. I have alwys looked with disfavor at ARM’s and sub-rate borrowing. Fortunately my chidren and various relatives have refused to get in the tangle. The banks should not be rewarded in any manner particularly the greedy ones. Nuff said