People power halts eviction

20Cent wrote: »

See LostInKildares post above, not scaremongering.
Leaving problems until them become a crisis has not worked out to well for us recently.

Yes, you are scaremongering.

The article from 2011 said 15,000 to 20,000 repossessions would happen that year.

Read the Irish Times article. it was the man from New Beginnings, the crowd looking for business off those in trouble, Mr. Hall that said there were combined 12,000 final notices and legal proceedings. He is a scaremongerer as that is his business. You get a final notice if you fall behind, otherwise if you continue not to pay, the bank has a problem years down the road trying to get the money off you - that is why there are so many of them. It is a very very long road from final notice to repossession which makes his figure look very stupid indeed.

The actual number was much, much less, below 1,000 even if you accept the Central Bank estimate is too low. 1,000 is 5% of 20,000.

Banks make their money on the interest paid on mortgages, so it is not in their interest to perform a knee jerk repossession on a house or apartment, particularly when they will have to sell the property at a loss.

While it is difficult to comment on this individual case without the full details (for example has the owner been negotiating with the bank, what makes the bank think the owner will not be able to pay back the mortgage in the long run etc etc), these events again just highlight how much the country lost the run of itself in the boom times.

I have a mortgage, and in big letters in about twenty different places across all the paper work I signed and went through with my solicitor it says Your house may be at risk if you fail to keep up with payments (or something like that in more legalish speak). While I could have bought an apartment that would cost me a significant amount of my take home pay and would have required a very high percentage mortgage, I purposefully didn't. I rented until property prices went down (which of course they did) and bought when prices were much more affordable. I am much less concerned now if I lose my job as I could pay my mortgage for a significant amount of time with my savings.

People seemed to have gotten it into their heads that not only was it a good idea to get a mortgage 95% to 100% the value of the property (meaning even the smallest drop in house prices meant you were in negative equity) but that in fact there was no risk at all to owning property.

I don't really understand what people were thinking, did they think property will always go up in value, or did they think that they would never lose their jobs, never have pay reduced, never be more stretched, that paying half your salary in a mortgage was a low risk adventure? The idea that the banks were stupid enough to let you get a 100% mortgage doesn't negate the fact that you were stupid enough to get one in the first place.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for groups and the government supporting people who are struggling, and for banks to be supported themselves so that they don't have to go chasing foreclosures (while we shouldn't have bailed out Anglo, we had to bail out the banking sector in general, an economy cannot function without banks).

What annoys me is that a lot of these anti-debt groups seem to be pushing the message that the home owners are innocent victims being manipulated by the big evil banks.

You signed the mortgage. You either understood the risks or didn't educate yourself to the risks. No one made you get that 95% mortgage, no one guaranteed you that property will never fall, or that you will never lose your job, or that you will never have other requirements that eat into your salary and the money for your mortgage.

I am very disappointed with the FF government for not stopping the property boom/bomb. A governments responsibility is to lead, and they are supposed to manage the over all economy. FF utterly messed this up, on purpose in order to keep a bubble economy going and anyone who voted for FF from 2004 onwards are idiots who have no one to blame but themselves.

But governments do not replace common sense and personal financial responsibility. It is a persons job to manage their own finances, to plan their savings and their debt, to understand that some things will be good and some things will be bad and you need to plan for both eventualities, or at least consider them.

The governments and banks should help people as much as possible, but this is not because the people are innocent victims. If your bank helps you out you should be grateful. If they eventually give up on you and require that you honor your contract you should accept that. It is the contract you signed. If you didn't understand it tough, why did you sign something you didn't understand. If you were stupid enough to think you would never be in financial trouble tough, why are you not seriously thinking about your life and your finances, do you expect someone else to?

Sorry for the long rant, this and people giving out about losing all their money in stocks and shares as if they had no idea share prices can fall, are two of my current bug bears. And don't get me started about the morons in Greece who think the country can go for 20 years not paying taxes while they survive on EU money and there will be no consequences.

walshb wrote: »

I wouldn't at all blame the normal joe soap house buyer in the boom. Sure, the prices weren't going to continually rise, but also, who could have predicted a STOP and a big crash?

Er, everyone. Or more specifically everyone who wasn't living in cloud cuckoo land. There has never been a housing bubble anywhere near as large as Irelands that had a soft landing, and economists had been warning about a hard landing for years before it happened.

Also you don't have to be an economist to know that a 95% mortgage on a property bought in a property boom (ie when prices are increasing rapidly, ie they eventually will have to decrease) is a terrible idea. You learn that basic stuff in Junior Cert business studies.

walshb wrote: »

Anyone who claims that they knew the prices would stop rising and then also crash dramatically is bull****ting!

Nonsense. Anyone who thought this would just go on for ever or though that we would have a soft landing is talking out their arse.

Show me any previous property boom as large as Irelands that had a soft landing. The only people saying their would be a soft landing were the government and the estate agents. Real estate bubbles hardly ever have soft landings, and never in the case as one so large as Ireland's.

Heck the Central Bank were warning in 2005 that we were up s**t creek, even Brian Cowen was trying to stress a need to be careful but was drowned out by Bertie (I can't decide is that is stupidity or negligence on Cowen's part). And this is before all the economists and professors screaming that we were in serious trouble.

How do I know this? Because I was there and I listened to them. If others didn't they can be annoyed at their own naivety or their own stupidity but they cannot claim they were mis-informed or that this was hidden from them. The information was there, but people decided to ignore it.

20Cent wrote: »

So anyone who bought a house between 2005 and 2008 was greedy and or stupid?

Anyone who bought a house between 2005 and 2008 with a ridiculously high loan to value ratio (probably because they had little to no savings to actually put towards the house) and a ridiculously high month re-payment with respect to their take home pay and who is now in trouble paying back their mortgage but thinks it is some how not their responsibility at all and is in fact the fault of the greedy banks who tricked them, or society who told them it was a good idea, or the government for not some how protecting them from themselves, was greedy and/or stupid.

southsiderosie wrote: »

But here is the thing: regardless of how fast property prices were moving up, if people bought a house in a scenario where : 1) they made a significant down payment, 2) they could afford the monthly repayments, and 3) they had enough money socked away to pay bills for at least 6 months in case they lost their job, the crash would still be bad, but it would not be financially ruinous. A lot of people bought houses that they could barely afford under the assumption that prices would go up forever, and that is not the case - ever.

From 2004 - 2006, I worked in Florida and part of my job was to track new real estate developments, the number of units, and the price points. It was patently obvious that the market was going to crash: in a poor city of 200,000 people, there were something like 40,000 units slated to come online over a 5-year period, none of which started at less than $299,000. People knew it was outrageous and unsustainable, but everyone thought that the person behind them would get caught holding the bag...Or they were terrified that they would be left behind, as prices continued to rise and rise. So it is not bull**** that people couldn't see a crash coming, but I think the reality is that fear and folly drove people to make a huge financial commitment without rationally assessing the situation.

True, I certainly know people who are kicking themselves now for being so naive but who would say that at the time they felt a pressure that they had to buy something, anything, in order to get on the rising tide.

Again I've sympathy for this, but it is the sympathy one feels for someone who did something stupid and now regrets it, and in fairness to most of my friends in this situation they know it was stupid and they aren't blaming anyone else.

20Cent wrote: »

You don't think the banks have anything to answer for?

Sure. Both the banks and the government acted in a reckless irresponsible fashion.

But we elect governments, and we choose which bank to use and which services to sign up for. Governments can't put in place ridiculous economic policy unless we elect them in the first place (and they certainly cannot continue with such policies unless we re-elect them), and banks cannot sell ridiculous risky financial products unless we are around to buy them.

This idea that if a bank tells you you can have a 100% mortgage then you have no responsibility to actually evaluate for yourself if that mortgage is a good idea or not, or if it is too risky an investment or not, is frankly moronic.