Forty-three hundred New Hampshire homes may go on the auction block in the next two years, reports business editor Bill Kirk of the Eagle Tribune. Banking Department Commissioner Peter Hildreth and Massachusetts banking and housing officials "are encouraging people who think they may be in an adjustable-rate mortgage to call immediately for help."

Yes, folks, you read that right. Banking officials are asking you to call if you think you might have an adjustable rate loan. I have to quit railing on the lenders, as I did in the article "Are You Being Duped By Your Lender?" Of course, in defense of that article, you probably are being played for a sucker on your home loan, but puh-lease folks, don't you know whether or not you have an adjustable rate mortgage (ARM)?

According to Kirk…

The culprit? Adjustable-rate mortgages with low "teaser rates" offered by unscrupulous brokers to people who really couldn't afford the homes they were buying in the first place. After a year or two, the teaser rates go up, pushing payments to unaffordable levels.

Kirk's right, of course, that lending money to a person you know can't pay it back (yet you still pocket the commission) is pretty shady. What is wrong with this picture is the continual abdication of responsibility by the all-consuming public.

Another part of the doom-and-gloom hew and cry is that it sells newspapers. Foreclosure.com quit publishing monthly foreclosure statistics because myriad wildly exaggerated claims, including on the ever auspicious Internet, made their numbers look bad. Good for them, but that being the case, their foreclosure statistics would be the ones I'd really like to see. C'mon Foreclosure.com. How bad is it really? (You can type in a zip code and get a listing…139 in my small rural town. Hmmm. Who knew that many "rich" people were in trouble financially? Evidently the highest-priced homes fall first and fall hardest.)

Ben Jones analyzes exactly that in his Foreclosure Report. He cites brash consumerism and a desire to keep up with the neighbors. Of course there is also that dirty little secret of lenders that they don’t call home buyers and try to work with them when they are only one or two payments behind. By the time the purchaser is three monthly payments behind and the mortgage company is taking it very seriously, chances are the homebuyer has no way in hell to come up with three arrears payments plus the next one due!

Truly, did no one see this coming?

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