It's still an uphill battle for homeowners, however, Charney says. There are few states where foreclosure proceedings have to go through a judge, notably Florida and New York, which gives homeowners their best shot.
In other states, homeowners have to go to court on their own in order to see a judge, running up expensive legal bills in hopes of stopping foreclosure. Some in Congress are trying to make it easier for homeowners.
John Conyers D-Mich. Barney Frank D-Mass. Kaptur said she's going to push to have her bill included as part of the impending financial regulatory overhaul. News U. Politics Joe Biden Congress Extremism. Special Projects Highline. HuffPost Personal Video Horoscopes. Follow Us. Terms Privacy Policy. Want to get even more depressed? Despite all the stories you read about flighty millennials refusing to plan for retirement as if our grandparents were obsessing over the details of their pension plans when they were 25 , the biggest problem we face is not financial illiteracy.
It is compound interest. In the coming decades, the returns on k plans are expected to fall by half. According to an analysis by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a drop in stock market returns of just 2 percentage points means a year-old would have to contribute more than double the amount to her retirement savings that a boomer did. Oh, and she'll have to do it on lower wages. This scenario gets even more dire when you consider what's going to happen to Social Security by the time we make it to When millennials retire, there will be just two.
When he finally got a job, his co-workers found out that he washed himself in gas station bathrooms and made him so miserable he quit. He got a job at a grocery store and slept in a shelter while he saved. First stop was subsidized housing in Kirkland, 20 minutes east across the lake. Then a rented house in Tacoma, 45 minutes south, sharing a bedroom with his girlfriend and, eventually, a son.
The first time we met, it was the 27th of the month and Tyrone told me his account was already zeroed out. He had pawned his skateboard the previous night for gas money. The crisis of our generation cannot be separated from the crisis of affordable housing. More people are renting homes than at any time since the late s. But in the 40 years leading up to the recession, rents increased at more than twice the rate of incomes.
Rather unsurprisingly, as housing prices have exploded, the number of to year-olds who own homes has plummeted. You rent for a while to save up for a down payment, then you buy a starter home with your partner, then you move into a larger place and raise a family. Once you pay off the mortgage, your house is either an asset to sell or a cheap place to live in retirement. This worked well when rents were low enough to save and homes were cheap enough to buy.
In one of the most infuriating conversations I had for this article, my father breezily informed me that he bought his first house at I am six years older now than my dad was then. My first house will cost more than 10 years of mine. They built upward, divided homes into apartments and added duplexes and townhomes.
But in the s, they stopped building. Cities kept adding jobs and people. At first, zoning was pretty modest. In the late s, it finally became illegal to deny housing to minorities. So cities instituted weirdly specific rules that drove up the price of new houses and excluded poor people—who were, disproportionately, minorities.
Houses had to have massive backyards. Basically, cities mandated McMansions. But all the political power is held by people who already own homes. Because when property values go up, so does their net worth. They have every reason to block new construction. They demand two parking spaces for every single unit. True story. The entire system is structured to produce expensive housing when we desperately need the opposite. The housing crisis in our most prosperous cities is now distorting the entire American economy.
For most of the 20th century, the way many workers improved their financial fortunes was to move closer to opportunities. Rents were higher in the boomtowns, but so were wages. Rural areas, meanwhile, still have fewer jobs than they did in For young people trying to find work, moving to a major city is not an indulgence. It is a virtual necessity. But the soaring rents in big cities are now canceling out the higher wages.
Back in , according to a Harvard study, an unskilled worker who moved from a low-income state to a high-income state kept 79 percent of his increased wages after he paid for housing. A worker who made the same move in kept just 36 percent. For the first time in U. This leaves young people, especially those without a college degree, with an impossible choice. They can move to a city where there are good jobs but insane rents. Or they can move somewhere with low rents but few jobs that pay above the minimum wage.
This dilemma is feeding the inequality-generating woodchipper the U. Rather than offering Americans a way to build wealth, cities are becoming concentrations of people who already have it. Millennials who are able to relocate to these oases of opportunity get to enjoy their many advantages: better schools, more generous social services, more rungs on the career ladder to grab on to. In , the Census Bureau reported that young people were less likely to have lived at a different address a year earlier than at any time since Homeownership and migration have been pitched to us as gateways to prosperity because, back when the boomers grew up, they were.
Over the eight months I spent reporting this story, I spent a few evenings at a youth homeless shelter and met unpaid interns and gig-economy bike messengers saving for their first month of rent. During the days I interviewed people like Josh, a year-old affordable housing developer who mentioned that his mother struggles to make ends meet as a contractor in a profession that used to be reliable government work. Fixing what has been done to us is going to take more than tinkering.
Any attempt to recreate the economic conditions the boomers had is just sending lifeboats to a whirlpool. But still, there is already a foot-long list of overdue federal policy changes that would at least begin to fortify our future and reknit the safety net. Even amid the awfulness of our political moment, we can start to build a platform to rally around. Raise the minimum wage and tie it to inflation. Tilt the tax code away from the wealthy. Right now, rich people can write off mortgage interest on their second home and expenses related to being a landlord or I'm not kidding owning a racehorse.
Some of the trendiest Big Policy Fixes these days are efforts to rebuild government services from the ground up. The ur-example is the Universal Basic Income, a no-questions-asked monthly cash payment to every single American. The idea is to establish a level of basic subsistence below which no one in a civilized country should be allowed to fall.
They have been intentionally made so. It would be nice if the people excited by the shiny new programs would expend a little effort defending and expanding the ones we already have. The way to solve this, when you think about it, is ridiculously simple: Attach benefits to work instead of jobs. The existing proposals vary, but the good ones are based on the same principle: For every hour you work, your boss chips in to a fund that pays out when you get sick, pregnant, old or fired.
The fund follows you from job to job, and companies have to contribute to it whether you work there a day, a month or a year. Small-scale versions of this idea have been offsetting the inherent insecurity of the gig economy since long before we called it that. Hollywood actors and technical staff have health and pension plans that follow them from movie to movie.
And we can roll it back the same way. Another no-brainer experiment is to expand jobs programs. But at the same time, the government has not actually attempted to give people jobs on a large scale since the s. Because most of us grew up in a world without them, jobs programs can sound overly ambitious or suspiciously Leninist. In , as part of the stimulus, Mississippi launched a program that simply reimbursed employers for the wages they paid to eligible new hires— percent at first, then tapering down to 25 percent.
The initiative primarily reached low-income mothers and the long-term unemployed. Nearly half of the recipients were under The results were impressive. For the average participant, the subsidized wages lasted only 13 weeks. Yet the year after the program ended, long-term unemployed workers were still earning nearly nine times more than they had the previous year.
Either they kept the jobs they got through the subsidies or the experience helped them find something new. Plus, the program was a bargain. Children of the participants even did better at school. Donald Trump, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are not interested in our innovative proposals to lift up the systemically disadvantaged. Their entire political agenda, from the Scrooge McDuck tax reform bill to the ongoing assassination attempt on Obamacare, is explicitly designed to turbocharge the forces that are causing this misery.
Federally speaking, things are only going to get worse. Over the last decade, states and cities have made remarkable progress adapting to the new economy. Minimum-wage hikes have been passed by voters in nine states, even dark red rectangles like Nebraska and South Dakota.
Following a long campaign by the Working Families Party and other activist organizations, eight states and the District of Columbia have instituted guaranteed sick leave. Bills to combat exploitative scheduling practices have been introduced in more than a dozen state legislatures.
San Francisco now gives retail and fast-food workers the right to learn their schedules two weeks in advance and get compensated for sudden shift changes.
The court system, the only branch of our government currently functioning, offers other encouraging avenues. A tsunami of similar lawsuits over working conditions and wage theft would be enough to force the same calculation onto every CEO in America.
Right now, permitting processes examine, in excruciating detail, how one new building will affect rents, noise, traffic, parking, shadows and squirrel populations. But they never investigate the consequences of not building anything—rising prices, displaced renters, low-wage workers commuting hours from outside the sprawl. Some cities are finally acknowledging this reality.
Portland and Denver have sped up approvals and streamlined permitting. For decades, politicians have been terrified of making the slightest twitch that might upset homeowners. The same logic could be applied to our entire generation. What if I run into an issue? Mortgage companies have a legal obligation to protect consumers during loan transfers between mortgage servicers. That means paperwork should not be lost, servicers should not lose track of a homeowner's loss mitigation plans, and they should not hinder a consumer's chance to save his or her home from unnecessary foreclosure.
Understand that the process of transferring servicing rights is challenging logistically. It might involve moving thousands of loan documents, which explains why issues arise. If your payment is returned and your servicer notifies you that it's no longer servicing your mortgage, know your rights. You do not want to end up in situation where you receive a notice in the mail stating that you're late on a payment -- and then wonder confusingly why you were never notified that you needed to send your payment to a new servicer.
Understand that both your old and new servicers must notify you about the transfer of your servicing rights no less than 15 days before the effective date of transfer. If you never received the servicing transfer notice, you can also file a complaint with the CFPB online. You should also consult an attorney. Remember, receiving a notice that your mortgage has been sold should not be taken personally.
As long as you have been notified in a timely manner, your new servicer accurately lists your information, and you send in payments to the right address you should have nothing to worry about. DarylParanada is a writer for MyBankTracker. News U. Politics Joe Biden Congress Extremism. Special Projects Highline. HuffPost Personal Video Horoscopes. Follow Us. Terms Privacy Policy. Suggest a correction.
MyBankTracker, Contributor. Newsletter Sign Up.
0コメント