With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.

On Thursday afternoon I am almost finished. I've spent most of the time working on the foreclosure research and I still have more to go until the second week of March. What could be more dull when you're working with data and staring at the screen all day long? But what fuel me was the sound of phone calls from the room across the hall, where my coworker sits down. She's a housing counselor working directly with people who have problems with foreclosure. The phone calls do not stop all day long. She might not be there in her office, and I could hear clearly the messages. "I am gonna loose my house in three days, please call me back." or "I just got laid off and I was behind three months on my house payment. I got the letter from the sheriff yesterday. Please help." or "I don't know where else to go, I am sick and I could not work, and I don't have nowhere to go if I have to leave my house." Those were some of the messages I heard from across the hall. What I am doing might be dull, but there's something wrong in the system when people keep loosing their house...

A very good question from a friend about the word "mortgage". Why is it called mortgage at the first place? Mortgage came from a french word that means dead vow. So when you're signing a mortgage, you could be signing your life away.

The market, policy and the nature of business has changed in the last thirty years. Thirty years ago, low-income and colored people could not get a mortgage. No one would lend money to them to buy a house. The CRA (Community Revitalization Act) came to the rescue, started in 1977, when the banks' and lending institutions' performance s was monitored or else they would not be able to expand. After that, lending institutions started to realize that poor people are market too. It means business to lend to them. Then there's subprime lenders, the good responsible one and the others. They don't care anymore if a person could afford a mortgage within their income. All they want is to get more money and more mortgage as possible from people regardless. With limited knowledge of mortgage and housing market, add to that desperation of owning a house, and add to that life! people were trapped into the mortgage, the dead vow, that lead them into long life misery of not being able to pay, of losing the house, of being in debt as long as they live.

There are too many things to be aware of in terms of mortgage and the nature of how they trapped people, it's getting trickier, I thought there must be a new method created everyday. Baloon payment, adjustable interest rate, late fees that's higher than the mortgage itself, rent-to-own, lease-to-own, interest only payment, the list goes on and on. The offer could come through your friends, your neighbor, your church buddies, but it doesn't justified if the mortgage would lead you to a house or a misery. The key is common sense. Read everything, question everything, never sign anything we don''t understand, never take word for word but get everything in writing.