Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

lmao what a fuckin dunce

https://twitter.com/eade_bengard/status/1696975297491665223

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

lmao what a fuckin dunce

https://twitter.com/eade_bengard/status/1696975297491665223

Thoguh posted:

lmao of course they are a blue check.

RadiRoot posted:

the only upgrade for an apartment i ever made was fixing a leaking toilet after waiting months and that was just $20

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

lmao what a fuckin dunce

https://twitter.com/eade_bengard/status/1696975297491665223

Ash Crimson posted:

*Guile voice* CHRONIC GOON

quote:

A rivalry developed between the two settlements, and those on the eastern shore began referring to the settlement on the western shore as the "Jersey Shore," because the Manning family had relocated from New Jersey. The nickname became so fixed that in 1826 the original name of Waynesburg was officially abandoned and changed to Jersey Shore.

War and Pieces posted:

I was supposed to get water at my fixer upper today after a year of waiting and then the digging machine broke

poemdexter posted:

You waited a year for a machine instead of buying a shovel?

Dr. VooDoo posted:

My only dream house is a small sea cottage on top of some cliffs overlooking the New England Atlantic so I can be an ocean hermit and die alone thanks

quote:

Mortgage assumption startup

Just conceptually it is an obvious trade:

• I own a house with a $400,000 mortgage with a 3% interest rate, and I want to sell it.
  
• You would like to buy my house for $500,000, putting 20% down and borrowing $400,000.
  
• But interest rates have gone up a lot, and if you got a $400,000 mortgage now, the interest rate would be 7%.
  
• You can’t afford that, so you don’t borrow $400,000, so you don’t buy my house.
  
• What if you could give me $100,000, move into the house, and take over my mortgage, making the 3% payments until it is paid off? Then we are both better off.

Broadly speaking you could imagine two ways to do this:

• (1) We could call up my mortgage lender and say “hey, everything about this mortgage is gonna stay the same — same amount ($400,000), same term (30 years or whatever), same rate (3%), same collateral (my house), except there’ll be a different borrower (you, not me). Are you cool with that?” And then the lender says “yes,” either out of the goodness of its heart or because we pay it a little fee or because the original terms of the mortgage specifically allowed me to let someone else take over the mortgage.
  
• (2) Magic? Like, we do some sleight of hand where we don’t call up my lender to get its approval, but we structure a transaction between ourselves that achieves this result. You give me $100,000, you move into the house, you send the mortgage checks to me, I forward them to my bank, we enter into some sort of blood oath that makes me not have to worry about your credit risk, I don’t know.

The first option is called “assuming” the mortgage. Generally speaking if you call up a bank asking them to let you assume a 3% mortgage, they will say no, because that is a money-losing trade for them. The lender would much rather have me sell the house for $500,000 to a new buyer who does not assume the mortgage, get its $400,000 below-market mortgage paid back, and then issue a new $400,000 mortgage to the buyer at market rates (7%).

But, in the US, some mortgages are, by their terms, assumable: The bank doesn’t have to like it, but it can’t say no. In particular, the Wall Street Journal reports:

quote:

Some 22% of active mortgages are part of the government programs that have assumption features, according to the mortgage-data and technology company Black Knight. That includes loans extended through the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Federal Housing Administration programs.

Few consumers know about the option, and fewer still follow through with it. The FHA has processed 3,349 assumptions in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, up from 2,566 in the year prior.

That Journal article is about a new company called Roam that is launching to address that problem, mostly by telling people with assumable mortgages that they have assumable mortgages:

quote:

Raunaq Singh, Roam’s founder and chief executive officer, says his new company will find and advertise home listings attached to attractive assumable mortgages. It is initially launching in Georgia, Arizona, Colorado, Texas and Florida.

The company aims to help with the paperwork and other bureaucratic hoops. That means working with the seller’s mortgage company on behalf of the buyer and seller.

“Have you ever called someone every day until you get what you wanted?” says Singh, who earlier in his career worked at the online real-estate company Opendoor. “That’s the kind of service we do on your behalf.”

The “paperwork and other bureaucratic hoops” are driven not only by old-fashioned banking processes but also by the fact we discussed above, that a bank doesn’t really want to keep a 3% mortgage outstanding if it doesn’t have to:

quote:

The startup could run up against the Luddite world of mortgage banking, where assumption documents are still often transmitted by fax machine. Lenders sometimes drag their feet in processing assumptions because they earn only a few hundred dollars for processing them, far less than for originating a new mortgage, according to Ted Tozer, nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center.

For loan assumptions to become popular, lenders will need to be allowed to earn more on them, Tozer says. “There’s not much you can do with that if the lenders aren’t going to be efficiently processing assumptions,” he says.

This is fine, this is a useful service. I will say though that I would much rather be writing about a new fintech startup doing Option 2: finding some way for you to assume my mortgage without the bank processing the assumption. Do the sleight of hand! Create value from nowhere! Oh I am not at all sure it could work or anything; I assume there’s a reason no one has done it. But rates really were 3% pretty recently, and they really are 7% now, and there really are a lot of 3% mortgages out there that are not assumable by their terms, and if someone could find something to do with them that would be a good business.

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

god i wish i could assume a 3% mortgage that would own

ArmZ posted:

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

interesting write up in matt levine's newsletter today

god i wish i could assume a 3% mortgage that would own

Relevant Tangent posted:

Might be fun, honestly

War and Pieces posted:

Got hit with a surprise bill of $3500 for "traffic control" in my year long quest to get water turned on at my $4000 house

poemdexter posted:

The roam thing looks neato because the only mortgages that are eligible are FHA and VA loans and you can only assume them if you are eligible for a FHA and/or VA loan. For someone selling, if they know you are going through roam, they at least know you're more than likely gonna live in the house since it's FHA/VA. And using roam means that you potentially get more eyeballs on your property since people can borrow against a 401k or something to cover the equity cost and then assume a mortgage.

War and Pieces posted:

Got hit with a surprise bill of $3500 for "traffic control" in my year long quest to get water turned on at my $4000 house

Greg12 posted:

I just saved you $3470

https://www.amazon.com/stop-slow-paddle-signs/s?k=stop+and+slow+paddle+signs

Willa Rogers posted:

when I cross as a pedestrian at a cross walk I hold up my hand and do the stop thing while I'm still on the curb

Jenny Agutter posted:

just step into the road, the cars will stop. doesn’t need a whole production

Twerk from Home posted:

Dozens of people die in crosswalks every year in Nashville because of thinking like this.

A grad student at the university I work at was run over by a truck and killed while trying to walk with the walk signal protecting her.