Making Money Online Easy

One of the great things about flying first class is that you often get to meet some interesting people. During the early eighties, I found myself on a flight from Los Angles to New York sitting next to an unknown, aspiring, young director named Oliver Stone, who was on his way to pitch a new film idea to potential investors.

Over six hours I enjoyed one of the most interesting conversations of my career, covering jungle combat in Vietnam, the ins and outs of movie making, and the harsh realities of Hollywood style accounting. The movie he was pitching turned out to be the 1987 industry cult classic, Wall Street.

The film sparked one of the greatest guessing games of all time, with everyone attempting to identify the real people behind the fictional characters. The villain, Gordon Gekko, was easy. That was Ivan Boesky, a risk arbitrageur who became the target of one of the first high profile insider trading case. Other links with reality were more obscure, and many real life traders on the floor of the NYSE simply played themselves as extras.

In the sequel, it is much easier to play who’s who, thanks to the financial crash that seems like was happening only yesterday. Gordon Gekko, released from federal prison, this time turns into legendary hedge fund manager John Paulson, whose character turns $100 million into $1.2 billion in a matter of months through buying up cheap credit default swaps on subprime debt. Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner are easy to pick out in a crucial meeting at the New York Fed. The chairman of “Keller Zabel” (Bear Stearns), one “Louis Zabel” (Ace Greenberg), throws himself in front of a train on the Lexington line. Well, this is fiction, after all. The $2 dollar/share sale price gave it all away.

Many people played themselves. The whole CNBC crowd was there, their descriptions of the crash so realistic that I thought it might be archival footage. So were Warren Buffet, Nouriel Roubini, Jim Chanos, and other notables. In fact, Chanos managed to get Stone to change the original script, switching the bad guy role from a hedge fund to Goldman Sachs (GS), known as “Churchill Schwartz,” as it should be. They are easily identified as the Wall Street firm that took out a big short in housing debt just before the crash.

Shia Labeouf does an outstanding job playing Jake Moore, an aggressive, razor sharp, earnest young investment banker. I have known so many like him over the years, both working for me and at competitors, that his performance really rung true. Michael Douglas, who has aged dramatically, seemed to be simply replaying the same role that he has in countless earlier films. To understand their characters, several actors opened up online trading accounts and did quite well in the market, with Shia alone reportedly booking some $20,000 in profits.

There are a few minor flaws in the film. It could have used more editing. There is a mention of “50% leverage” of subprime debt, when the correct figure was 50 times. The Chinese government investor doesn’t act like a real person from the People’s Republic, but as an American with a bad accent. No one has yet figures out the true meaning of Eli Wallach’s repeated bird calls.

In this incredibly target rich environment, Stone seems to take aim at so many enemies, That even an insider myself got confused. However, these are trivial complaints. If you want to have a hoot, go see the film, but expect to provide a simultaneous translation about all of the different instruments and strategies if you bring any non financial types with you.

Not wanting to spoil the ending, I’ll say no more, except that you can buy the original wall Street movie from Amazon by clicking here at http://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-Charlie-Sheen/dp/B00003CXDB/ref=sr_1_2?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1285432060&sr=1-2

And thanks to Oliver’s advice, I never got involved in financially backing a film project, despite countless invitations to do. It was the best trade I never did.

To see the data, charts, and graphs that support this research piece, as well as more iconoclastic and out-of-consensus analysis, please visit me at www.madhedgefundtrader.com . There, you will find the conventional wisdom mercilessly flailed and tortured daily, and my last two years of research reports available for free. You can also listen to me on Hedge Fund Radio by clicking on “This Week on Hedge Fund Radio” in the upper right corner of my home page.

To summarize an hour of dialogue, you should at some point have a product that your readers will want. You should give a lot of free content away, but even when it comes to content, you can charge for some amount, and if your content is good enough, people will pay for the premium stuff. "You can tell them about ninety percent, and they'll pay money just to get the final ten percent," so they know they have the whole picture, Clark says.



Making money blogging will not happen overnight. Sometimes it may seem like this is possible, but in reality, it takes a lot of work. "Build something that is real and something that matters to people," Rowse advises. He shared a story about how he launched a product one day and literally watched the sales roll in. It was as if he had hit a button, and the cash just started flowing, but then he realized he had been working hard up to that point for over two years, promoting the blog, writing two posts a day, doing SEO, press releases, etc. It wasn't overnight. 



You're not scalable, meaning that as your audience grows and more people want to connect with you, there will be a point where it just becomes too much. You have to set boundaries, otherwise you will have no time for yourself and your family. 



Eventually, you're going to have to "get real" about how many meaningful connections you can make in a day, Simone says, adding, "That's part of growing up in social media.”



When they say "no one actually wants that much authenticity," they mean that nobody cares about what you did last night, who you were with, what you had for breakfast, etc. In other words, don't show everybody everything about yourself, because you're not writing for you. You're writing for them. Be who you want to be for your audience. 



Ultimately, you're blogging and using social media to sell, but you can't just go around selling to people, because they won't have it. It just doesn't work. You have to make them want to buy. "You're selling yourself," says Clark. If you provide enough value to your audience, they will want to buy what you have to offer if it expands upon the value you're already giving them. "The content is the marketing," he says. 



Just having a blog is not a business. If you want it to be a business you have to treat it like one, Rowse says. This is basically an extension of number 2. 



The most important of the seven points is that no one is reading your blog. As Simone says, there are hundreds of millions of blogs, and that includes blogs on your topic. You have to write it in a way that is fresh, and either entertaining or informative. The good news is that you don't need "monster traffic". You just need a good, steady core audience for advertising to do well. 

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Making Money Without

Your credit can determine interest rates for loans, as well as whether or not you'll qualify for credit in the first place. Employers also ask you to let them run credit checks on you to see if you're reliable. So it's in your best interests to avoid making mistakes that will ruin your credit rating.

Posting at Financial Edge, personal finance blogger Fabulously Broke puts you at ease by identifying several blunders that won't torpedo your credit score. Here are a few of our favorites:

*Making too much or too little money. Income does not affect credit ratings.

*Late payments to utilities and phone companies. You'll want to check with the laws and procedures in your own state, but in general utilities don't report your payment history to credit agencies. On the other hand, if your bills go to collections, a collections agent will tattle on you.

*Checking your own credit. Credit checks from outside sources make it seem as though you may be applying for more credit, but checks of your own credit won't draw red flags.

*Having loans with high interest rates. It's your credit rating that affects your interest rates and not the other way around.

Check out the rest of the post at the link below for other mistakes that won't damage your credit.

For more information about free credit reports, go to the FTC at FTC.gov/freereports

8 Slipups That Won't Hurt Your Credit Score [Financial Edge]

This was probably inevitable: the minute that Dodd-Frank cracked down on the fees charged by credit cards aimed at students, some other bright financial innovation would crop up. This time, a debit card aimed at students. Which carries lots of fees. Ylan Mui reports that a company called Higher One has started signing up colleges around the country, taking on the burden of providing cash to students. In return, it gets lots of fees:

Students say several of the fees associated with Higher One’s card are particularly irksome, including the $19 inactivity fee, a 50-cent charge for using a PIN to make a purchase rather than a signature, and a $2.50 fee for using other banks’ ATMs…

Higher One said that only 1 percent of customers have been charged an inactivity fee and that more than half are charged the 50-cent fee only once. All fees are listed on Higher One’s Web site, along with tips on avoiding them.

“We have a big effort with educating students on how to use the account,” Smith said. “We’re very passionate about financial literacy.”

If the fees are listed on Higher One’s website, they’re not exactly prominent. I did find this page, eventually, via this blog entry, but it just says that “when you swipe & sign, you won’t be charged the PIN-based transaction fee”. I haven’t been able to find a page showing a 50-cent transaction fee anywhere*, although I did manage to find this page, showing a $25 fee for domestic wire transfers and a $50 fee for international wire transfers. “Higher One offers less costly alternatives for transferring funds”, it says, without giving any indication what they might be; I suspect that what they’re talking about is transfers to or from people who have already registered somehow with Higher One.

It should go without saying that any firm which is “very passionate about financial literacy” would encourage, rather than penalize, simple, cheap and safe PIN-debit transactions. It would not give students a debit card and then tell them that if they want to avoid fees they should select the “credit” option rather than the “debit” option when they come to pay.

And I can’t think of any good reason to charge a $19 inactivity fee to people who haven’t used their cards in 9 months.

The fact is that students are often very naive when it comes to money, and it’s easy to gouge them once or twice before they learn that banks are not necessarily on their side. If you can get your card accepted by a majority of freshmen every year, and then come up with all manner of weird fees to hit them with, that’s a great way of making money out of ignorance.

Meanwhile, all students should have a bank account: giving them a debit card instead only serves to maximize the number of unbanked students. So while I’m sure cards like this are attractive to colleges, it would be great if either the colleges or else the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started being a lot more critical of them. Prepaid cards only ever make sense if the alternative is being completely unbanked; that should not ever be the case for students.

*At Southern Oregon University, Higher One agreed to waive the 50-cent PIN-debit charge, but only if there was a simultaneous “swipe-and-sign” campaign. If the campaign is unsuccessful and students do the sensible thing by using PIN debit, then the university can be charged $2 per student for “PIN fee elimination”.

Update: Higher One’s Donald Smith responds:

Higher One was founded 10 years ago by three college students (undergraduates at the time) who were looking for streamlining the way financial aid refunds were distributed to students. Today we work with more than 675 campuses across the country, have a 97% client retention rating, and an A+ rating with the BBB.

The OneAccount is Higher One’s optional, no minimum balance, no monthly fee, FDIC-Insured checking account created by students for students. We do not offer a stored value card. We are very open with our fee schedule. We post it on every program website for all to access, explain each fee, discuss how to avoid each fee, and provide students with a web page that tells them how to use the account for free (which you’ve already found). Because of this, we believe that our customers pay less than half the amount in fees that the average bank checking account customer pays per year.

Two of the fees you referenced in your blog are the PIN fee and the Abandoned Account Fee. The PIN fee is easily avoided by choosing a signature based transaction at the checkout. The majority of students uses it in this manner and is in turn protected by MasterCard’s Zero Liability Policy against fraudulent charges (a safer way of purchasing than a PIN based transaction). We do not have an inactivity fee on our fee schedule – we don’t penalize students who do not use their accounts. We do have an Abandoned Account Fee of up to $19, for those who have abandoned their accounts, but this has been charged to less than 1% of all OneAccount holders in our company’s history because of our proactive outreach plan.

Higher One offers no instruments of credit. As a matter of fact, we’re generally in favor of initiatives restricting students’ access to credit cards and promoting financial literacy. This is why we offer a full range of financial literacy resources along with the services we provide.

I particularly dislike the implication, here, that PIN-based transactions are unsafe. They’re not; they’re just less lucrative, in terms of interchange fees, than signature-based transactions.

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<b>News</b> - Joy Behar, Bill O&#39;Reilly Continue Trading Insults <b>...</b>

She accuses him of making "hate speech"; he says he refuses to sugar coat "harsh realities"

Fox <b>News</b> Remains Far Ahead Of Cable <b>News</b> Competition During Pre <b>...</b>

Fox News Channel finished #4 in prime time on all of cable (total viewers) last week - the week before their ratings are likely to increase even further thanks to the miner rescue coverage. Here's a look at the rest of cable news:

Public Address | Hard <b>News</b>

If Len Brown – cleverly claiming the mantle of Mayor Robbie – can help make that experience possible across more of the big news, city, he'll have done a good thing. View Gallery � View Printable � Link to this Post � Send Feedback to ...

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Your credit can determine interest rates for loans, as well as whether or not you'll qualify for credit in the first place. Employers also ask you to let them run credit checks on you to see if you're reliable. So it's in your best interests to avoid making mistakes that will ruin your credit rating.

Posting at Financial Edge, personal finance blogger Fabulously Broke puts you at ease by identifying several blunders that won't torpedo your credit score. Here are a few of our favorites:

*Making too much or too little money. Income does not affect credit ratings.

*Late payments to utilities and phone companies. You'll want to check with the laws and procedures in your own state, but in general utilities don't report your payment history to credit agencies. On the other hand, if your bills go to collections, a collections agent will tattle on you.

*Checking your own credit. Credit checks from outside sources make it seem as though you may be applying for more credit, but checks of your own credit won't draw red flags.

*Having loans with high interest rates. It's your credit rating that affects your interest rates and not the other way around.

Check out the rest of the post at the link below for other mistakes that won't damage your credit.

For more information about free credit reports, go to the FTC at FTC.gov/freereports

8 Slipups That Won't Hurt Your Credit Score [Financial Edge]

This was probably inevitable: the minute that Dodd-Frank cracked down on the fees charged by credit cards aimed at students, some other bright financial innovation would crop up. This time, a debit card aimed at students. Which carries lots of fees. Ylan Mui reports that a company called Higher One has started signing up colleges around the country, taking on the burden of providing cash to students. In return, it gets lots of fees:

Students say several of the fees associated with Higher One’s card are particularly irksome, including the $19 inactivity fee, a 50-cent charge for using a PIN to make a purchase rather than a signature, and a $2.50 fee for using other banks’ ATMs…

Higher One said that only 1 percent of customers have been charged an inactivity fee and that more than half are charged the 50-cent fee only once. All fees are listed on Higher One’s Web site, along with tips on avoiding them.

“We have a big effort with educating students on how to use the account,” Smith said. “We’re very passionate about financial literacy.”

If the fees are listed on Higher One’s website, they’re not exactly prominent. I did find this page, eventually, via this blog entry, but it just says that “when you swipe & sign, you won’t be charged the PIN-based transaction fee”. I haven’t been able to find a page showing a 50-cent transaction fee anywhere*, although I did manage to find this page, showing a $25 fee for domestic wire transfers and a $50 fee for international wire transfers. “Higher One offers less costly alternatives for transferring funds”, it says, without giving any indication what they might be; I suspect that what they’re talking about is transfers to or from people who have already registered somehow with Higher One.

It should go without saying that any firm which is “very passionate about financial literacy” would encourage, rather than penalize, simple, cheap and safe PIN-debit transactions. It would not give students a debit card and then tell them that if they want to avoid fees they should select the “credit” option rather than the “debit” option when they come to pay.

And I can’t think of any good reason to charge a $19 inactivity fee to people who haven’t used their cards in 9 months.

The fact is that students are often very naive when it comes to money, and it’s easy to gouge them once or twice before they learn that banks are not necessarily on their side. If you can get your card accepted by a majority of freshmen every year, and then come up with all manner of weird fees to hit them with, that’s a great way of making money out of ignorance.

Meanwhile, all students should have a bank account: giving them a debit card instead only serves to maximize the number of unbanked students. So while I’m sure cards like this are attractive to colleges, it would be great if either the colleges or else the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started being a lot more critical of them. Prepaid cards only ever make sense if the alternative is being completely unbanked; that should not ever be the case for students.

*At Southern Oregon University, Higher One agreed to waive the 50-cent PIN-debit charge, but only if there was a simultaneous “swipe-and-sign” campaign. If the campaign is unsuccessful and students do the sensible thing by using PIN debit, then the university can be charged $2 per student for “PIN fee elimination”.

Update: Higher One’s Donald Smith responds:

Higher One was founded 10 years ago by three college students (undergraduates at the time) who were looking for streamlining the way financial aid refunds were distributed to students. Today we work with more than 675 campuses across the country, have a 97% client retention rating, and an A+ rating with the BBB.

The OneAccount is Higher One’s optional, no minimum balance, no monthly fee, FDIC-Insured checking account created by students for students. We do not offer a stored value card. We are very open with our fee schedule. We post it on every program website for all to access, explain each fee, discuss how to avoid each fee, and provide students with a web page that tells them how to use the account for free (which you’ve already found). Because of this, we believe that our customers pay less than half the amount in fees that the average bank checking account customer pays per year.

Two of the fees you referenced in your blog are the PIN fee and the Abandoned Account Fee. The PIN fee is easily avoided by choosing a signature based transaction at the checkout. The majority of students uses it in this manner and is in turn protected by MasterCard’s Zero Liability Policy against fraudulent charges (a safer way of purchasing than a PIN based transaction). We do not have an inactivity fee on our fee schedule – we don’t penalize students who do not use their accounts. We do have an Abandoned Account Fee of up to $19, for those who have abandoned their accounts, but this has been charged to less than 1% of all OneAccount holders in our company’s history because of our proactive outreach plan.

Higher One offers no instruments of credit. As a matter of fact, we’re generally in favor of initiatives restricting students’ access to credit cards and promoting financial literacy. This is why we offer a full range of financial literacy resources along with the services we provide.

I particularly dislike the implication, here, that PIN-based transactions are unsafe. They’re not; they’re just less lucrative, in terms of interchange fees, than signature-based transactions.

benchcraft company scam

<b>News</b> - Joy Behar, Bill O&#39;Reilly Continue Trading Insults <b>...</b>

She accuses him of making "hate speech"; he says he refuses to sugar coat "harsh realities"

Fox <b>News</b> Remains Far Ahead Of Cable <b>News</b> Competition During Pre <b>...</b>

Fox News Channel finished #4 in prime time on all of cable (total viewers) last week - the week before their ratings are likely to increase even further thanks to the miner rescue coverage. Here's a look at the rest of cable news:

Public Address | Hard <b>News</b>

If Len Brown – cleverly claiming the mantle of Mayor Robbie – can help make that experience possible across more of the big news, city, he'll have done a good thing. View Gallery � View Printable � Link to this Post � Send Feedback to ...

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benchcraft company scam

<b>News</b> - Joy Behar, Bill O&#39;Reilly Continue Trading Insults <b>...</b>

She accuses him of making "hate speech"; he says he refuses to sugar coat "harsh realities"

Fox <b>News</b> Remains Far Ahead Of Cable <b>News</b> Competition During Pre <b>...</b>

Fox News Channel finished #4 in prime time on all of cable (total viewers) last week - the week before their ratings are likely to increase even further thanks to the miner rescue coverage. Here's a look at the rest of cable news:

Public Address | Hard <b>News</b>

If Len Brown – cleverly claiming the mantle of Mayor Robbie – can help make that experience possible across more of the big news, city, he'll have done a good thing. View Gallery � View Printable � Link to this Post � Send Feedback to ...

benchcraft company portland or

Your credit can determine interest rates for loans, as well as whether or not you'll qualify for credit in the first place. Employers also ask you to let them run credit checks on you to see if you're reliable. So it's in your best interests to avoid making mistakes that will ruin your credit rating.

Posting at Financial Edge, personal finance blogger Fabulously Broke puts you at ease by identifying several blunders that won't torpedo your credit score. Here are a few of our favorites:

*Making too much or too little money. Income does not affect credit ratings.

*Late payments to utilities and phone companies. You'll want to check with the laws and procedures in your own state, but in general utilities don't report your payment history to credit agencies. On the other hand, if your bills go to collections, a collections agent will tattle on you.

*Checking your own credit. Credit checks from outside sources make it seem as though you may be applying for more credit, but checks of your own credit won't draw red flags.

*Having loans with high interest rates. It's your credit rating that affects your interest rates and not the other way around.

Check out the rest of the post at the link below for other mistakes that won't damage your credit.

For more information about free credit reports, go to the FTC at FTC.gov/freereports

8 Slipups That Won't Hurt Your Credit Score [Financial Edge]

This was probably inevitable: the minute that Dodd-Frank cracked down on the fees charged by credit cards aimed at students, some other bright financial innovation would crop up. This time, a debit card aimed at students. Which carries lots of fees. Ylan Mui reports that a company called Higher One has started signing up colleges around the country, taking on the burden of providing cash to students. In return, it gets lots of fees:

Students say several of the fees associated with Higher One’s card are particularly irksome, including the $19 inactivity fee, a 50-cent charge for using a PIN to make a purchase rather than a signature, and a $2.50 fee for using other banks’ ATMs…

Higher One said that only 1 percent of customers have been charged an inactivity fee and that more than half are charged the 50-cent fee only once. All fees are listed on Higher One’s Web site, along with tips on avoiding them.

“We have a big effort with educating students on how to use the account,” Smith said. “We’re very passionate about financial literacy.”

If the fees are listed on Higher One’s website, they’re not exactly prominent. I did find this page, eventually, via this blog entry, but it just says that “when you swipe & sign, you won’t be charged the PIN-based transaction fee”. I haven’t been able to find a page showing a 50-cent transaction fee anywhere*, although I did manage to find this page, showing a $25 fee for domestic wire transfers and a $50 fee for international wire transfers. “Higher One offers less costly alternatives for transferring funds”, it says, without giving any indication what they might be; I suspect that what they’re talking about is transfers to or from people who have already registered somehow with Higher One.

It should go without saying that any firm which is “very passionate about financial literacy” would encourage, rather than penalize, simple, cheap and safe PIN-debit transactions. It would not give students a debit card and then tell them that if they want to avoid fees they should select the “credit” option rather than the “debit” option when they come to pay.

And I can’t think of any good reason to charge a $19 inactivity fee to people who haven’t used their cards in 9 months.

The fact is that students are often very naive when it comes to money, and it’s easy to gouge them once or twice before they learn that banks are not necessarily on their side. If you can get your card accepted by a majority of freshmen every year, and then come up with all manner of weird fees to hit them with, that’s a great way of making money out of ignorance.

Meanwhile, all students should have a bank account: giving them a debit card instead only serves to maximize the number of unbanked students. So while I’m sure cards like this are attractive to colleges, it would be great if either the colleges or else the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started being a lot more critical of them. Prepaid cards only ever make sense if the alternative is being completely unbanked; that should not ever be the case for students.

*At Southern Oregon University, Higher One agreed to waive the 50-cent PIN-debit charge, but only if there was a simultaneous “swipe-and-sign” campaign. If the campaign is unsuccessful and students do the sensible thing by using PIN debit, then the university can be charged $2 per student for “PIN fee elimination”.

Update: Higher One’s Donald Smith responds:

Higher One was founded 10 years ago by three college students (undergraduates at the time) who were looking for streamlining the way financial aid refunds were distributed to students. Today we work with more than 675 campuses across the country, have a 97% client retention rating, and an A+ rating with the BBB.

The OneAccount is Higher One’s optional, no minimum balance, no monthly fee, FDIC-Insured checking account created by students for students. We do not offer a stored value card. We are very open with our fee schedule. We post it on every program website for all to access, explain each fee, discuss how to avoid each fee, and provide students with a web page that tells them how to use the account for free (which you’ve already found). Because of this, we believe that our customers pay less than half the amount in fees that the average bank checking account customer pays per year.

Two of the fees you referenced in your blog are the PIN fee and the Abandoned Account Fee. The PIN fee is easily avoided by choosing a signature based transaction at the checkout. The majority of students uses it in this manner and is in turn protected by MasterCard’s Zero Liability Policy against fraudulent charges (a safer way of purchasing than a PIN based transaction). We do not have an inactivity fee on our fee schedule – we don’t penalize students who do not use their accounts. We do have an Abandoned Account Fee of up to $19, for those who have abandoned their accounts, but this has been charged to less than 1% of all OneAccount holders in our company’s history because of our proactive outreach plan.

Higher One offers no instruments of credit. As a matter of fact, we’re generally in favor of initiatives restricting students’ access to credit cards and promoting financial literacy. This is why we offer a full range of financial literacy resources along with the services we provide.

I particularly dislike the implication, here, that PIN-based transactions are unsafe. They’re not; they’re just less lucrative, in terms of interchange fees, than signature-based transactions.

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<b>News</b> - Joy Behar, Bill O&#39;Reilly Continue Trading Insults <b>...</b>

She accuses him of making "hate speech"; he says he refuses to sugar coat "harsh realities"

Fox <b>News</b> Remains Far Ahead Of Cable <b>News</b> Competition During Pre <b>...</b>

Fox News Channel finished #4 in prime time on all of cable (total viewers) last week - the week before their ratings are likely to increase even further thanks to the miner rescue coverage. Here's a look at the rest of cable news:

Public Address | Hard <b>News</b>

If Len Brown – cleverly claiming the mantle of Mayor Robbie – can help make that experience possible across more of the big news, city, he'll have done a good thing. View Gallery � View Printable � Link to this Post � Send Feedback to ...

bench craft company reviews

benchcraft company portland or

<b>News</b> - Joy Behar, Bill O&#39;Reilly Continue Trading Insults <b>...</b>

She accuses him of making "hate speech"; he says he refuses to sugar coat "harsh realities"

Fox <b>News</b> Remains Far Ahead Of Cable <b>News</b> Competition During Pre <b>...</b>

Fox News Channel finished #4 in prime time on all of cable (total viewers) last week - the week before their ratings are likely to increase even further thanks to the miner rescue coverage. Here's a look at the rest of cable news:

Public Address | Hard <b>News</b>

If Len Brown – cleverly claiming the mantle of Mayor Robbie – can help make that experience possible across more of the big news, city, he'll have done a good thing. View Gallery � View Printable � Link to this Post � Send Feedback to ...

bench craft company reviews

<b>News</b> - Joy Behar, Bill O&#39;Reilly Continue Trading Insults <b>...</b>

She accuses him of making "hate speech"; he says he refuses to sugar coat "harsh realities"

Fox <b>News</b> Remains Far Ahead Of Cable <b>News</b> Competition During Pre <b>...</b>

Fox News Channel finished #4 in prime time on all of cable (total viewers) last week - the week before their ratings are likely to increase even further thanks to the miner rescue coverage. Here's a look at the rest of cable news:

Public Address | Hard <b>News</b>

If Len Brown – cleverly claiming the mantle of Mayor Robbie – can help make that experience possible across more of the big news, city, he'll have done a good thing. View Gallery � View Printable � Link to this Post � Send Feedback to ...

bench craft company reviews

<b>News</b> - Joy Behar, Bill O&#39;Reilly Continue Trading Insults <b>...</b>

She accuses him of making "hate speech"; he says he refuses to sugar coat "harsh realities"

Fox <b>News</b> Remains Far Ahead Of Cable <b>News</b> Competition During Pre <b>...</b>

Fox News Channel finished #4 in prime time on all of cable (total viewers) last week - the week before their ratings are likely to increase even further thanks to the miner rescue coverage. Here's a look at the rest of cable news:

Public Address | Hard <b>News</b>

If Len Brown – cleverly claiming the mantle of Mayor Robbie – can help make that experience possible across more of the big news, city, he'll have done a good thing. View Gallery � View Printable � Link to this Post � Send Feedback to ...

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<b>News</b> - Joy Behar, Bill O&#39;Reilly Continue Trading Insults <b>...</b>

She accuses him of making "hate speech"; he says he refuses to sugar coat "harsh realities"

Fox <b>News</b> Remains Far Ahead Of Cable <b>News</b> Competition During Pre <b>...</b>

Fox News Channel finished #4 in prime time on all of cable (total viewers) last week - the week before their ratings are likely to increase even further thanks to the miner rescue coverage. Here's a look at the rest of cable news:

Public Address | Hard <b>News</b>

If Len Brown – cleverly claiming the mantle of Mayor Robbie – can help make that experience possible across more of the big news, city, he'll have done a good thing. View Gallery � View Printable � Link to this Post � Send Feedback to ...

benchcraft company scam

Public Domain books are a gold mine if done correctly. There are so many ways to use them that a publisher could be making money all the time. The concept is simple, redistribute works in public domain, but the key is how you do it. This article will focus on creating E-books and print-on-demand books. We will walk step-by-step on how to do it without it costing you a fortune.

Step 1

Locate Public Domain Source. Most people use Gutenberg, which has the largest collection with over 30,000 books in the public domain. The U.S. government is a big source of public domain materials that cover just about any topic. A smart move is to make sure that the material you are using is not saturating the market online for free. But, there is a way around that; by changing the content to fit your niche, it makes it a new peace. For example, The Art of War has been published with all kinds of niches like business. By reducing the target audience, it helps the cause.

Step 2

Research how to present the book. The least expensive way is through an E-book. But it, you use online print-on-demand services; there should be no problem with costs.

Step 3

Make a good design for the book. Depending on the size of the book, you could use LuLu, Create Space (in partnership with Amazon), or your own program to design the book.

Step 4

Price the book to the market: You could issue it for free, if it is a book that a lot of people have republished, but it is recommended that you have something waiting in the wings to sell to that group of buyers. The rule is , the more technical the book, the more expensive. But regular books are being sold for around $25 for around 300 pages.

Step5

Distribute the book. If you have a mailing list, or know how to market, you can sell the book. By having an ISBN, you can list it with the major bookstores online, such as Barnes and Noble and Amazon. CreateSpace issues an ISBN, but does not work off Amazon. Lulu charges about $99 for one, so if you plan on publishing more than one book, you might want to get a publisher's ISBN. A publisher's ISBN costs around $275 for ten. Single ISBNs are not sold. Also, for each title being published, a bar code may be needed. Those run around $25. The benefit to getting a publisher's ISBN is that you own the numbers. Plan ahead, because it takes about two weeks to get ISBN's unless you pay extra..

ResourcesGutenberg

• Lulu Publishing
• How to Obtain Public Domain Books
• ISBN

big seminar 14

<b>News</b> - Joy Behar, Bill O&#39;Reilly Continue Trading Insults <b>...</b>

She accuses him of making "hate speech"; he says he refuses to sugar coat "harsh realities"

Fox <b>News</b> Remains Far Ahead Of Cable <b>News</b> Competition During Pre <b>...</b>

Fox News Channel finished #4 in prime time on all of cable (total viewers) last week - the week before their ratings are likely to increase even further thanks to the miner rescue coverage. Here's a look at the rest of cable news:

Public Address | Hard <b>News</b>

If Len Brown – cleverly claiming the mantle of Mayor Robbie – can help make that experience possible across more of the big news, city, he'll have done a good thing. View Gallery � View Printable � Link to this Post � Send Feedback to ...

big seminar 14

<b>News</b> - Joy Behar, Bill O&#39;Reilly Continue Trading Insults <b>...</b>

She accuses him of making "hate speech"; he says he refuses to sugar coat "harsh realities"

Fox <b>News</b> Remains Far Ahead Of Cable <b>News</b> Competition During Pre <b>...</b>

Fox News Channel finished #4 in prime time on all of cable (total viewers) last week - the week before their ratings are likely to increase even further thanks to the miner rescue coverage. Here's a look at the rest of cable news:

Public Address | Hard <b>News</b>

If Len Brown – cleverly claiming the mantle of Mayor Robbie – can help make that experience possible across more of the big news, city, he'll have done a good thing. View Gallery � View Printable � Link to this Post � Send Feedback to ...

big seminar 14

foreclosure report

There are so many fronts to the foreclosure crisis that it’s now becoming difficult to stay on top of all of them.

One development Monday that didn’t get the attention it deserved is the fact that Bank of America is now eating title insurance liability on foreclosed properties sold by its servicer. Per Bloomberg:

Bank of America’s agreement with Jacksonville, Florida- based Fidelity National calls for the lender to cover the title insurer’s costs in the event of an error in the company’s processing of foreclosure documents, Sadowski said. The bank will notify the insurer in each case that the foreclosure complies with state laws and regulations.

Bank of America is in talks with other title insurers for similar agreements, said Richard Bramhall, the bank’s chief title officer. He declined to name the other companies.

This is a big deal for several reasons:

1. The liability in case of a wrongful foreclosure is large. There is no way for the wronged borrower to get his house back, so title insurance is the only recourse. As Bob Lawless explained in Credit Slips:

…most every (or maybe even every–I’ll let someone else do the 50-state survey) state provides the strongest possible finality protections for deeds obtained through foreclosure sales. We also see similar rules for other judicially supervised sales in other contexts such as sales of personal property subject to a security interest or bankruptcy sales….

Suppose Henry and Helen Homeowner lost their home in foreclosure proceeding, and it has since been purchased by Bill and Betty Buyer. Now, Henry and Helen discover the affidavits in their foreclosure proceeding had some of the very same apparently fraudulent signatures reported in the media. When Henry and Helen complain to the court, the answer should be: “Your complaint is against Deutsche Bank (or whoever foreclosed) and not against Bill and Betty. You can recover damages from Deutsche Bank but not eject Henry and Helen from possession.” In turn, this will mean that that Bill and Betty (or their lender) will not have to look to the title insurer for recovery.

2. This means the large banks now effectively have direct exposure to borrowers for screw ups in foreclosures (note that they did earlier, in theory, but this move shortens the process of the money coming from the bank).

3. The liability is via the bank servicer. Note the Bank of American is now the largest servicer in the US (Wells is a close second) by virtue of having bought Countrywide.

4. Some contend that the risk of clouded title means that title insurers may come to require warranties from banks for all properties sold that has securitized mortgages. As Adam Levitin indicated in a Citigroup report, documentation lapses could “cloud title on not just foreclosed mortgages but on performing mortgages.”

It isn’t hard to see that other banks are likely to be required to take the same step as Bank of America, at least if they want to unload foreclosed property.

It isn’t hard to see where this is going. The biggest servicers are part of TBTF banks. The biggest trustees (the folks who were supposed to make sure that the loans all got to the securitization trust properly) are part of TBTF banks. The major structurer/packagers are now all part of TBTF banks.

Isn’t a concentrated financial services industry grand? Any time they screw up, they are too large to be made to pay for their crimes. The die was cast at the beginning of the Obama administration. It was a critical window of opportunity to take over and put new management in the weakest of the big banks (and probably force them to shed operations too) and they instead were coddled and sent back on their merry way.

I guarantee that the losses, between extend and pretend that will no longer be viable (in particular, the unrealistic marks on second mortgages) and the liabilities resulting from this colossal mess, at least one major bank will be insolvent. But the odds of the new special resolution authority being used? I put the odds at pretty much zero.

Just when it looked like the Ally Financial/GMAC Mortgage robo-signing drama couldn't get any more, well, dramatic -- it did. Last week, the fourth-largest mortgage lender in America revealed that the foreclosure documents for potentially all its foreclosures over the last five years had simply not been read, because the staffer tasked with signing them had been assigned the inhuman job of "reading" and signing over 10,000 documents per month.



More than 50,000 foreclosures, evictions and resales of foreclosed homes on home loans held or serviced by GMAC Mortgage were frozen across 23 states; within the week, the California attorney general had asked GMAC to stop foreclosures in the nation's largest state until the company could prove it was complying with state foreclosure laws, Connecticut's attorney general had requested a court order halting all banks from foreclosing on homes there for 60 days and the attorneys general of Ohio and Florida had initiated investigations into GMAC foreclosures.



This week, though, the debacle flew straight up the food chain of the mortgage lending industry. Executives at JP Morgan Chase and the country's largest mortgage lender, Bank of America, have also confessed to signing tens of thousands of foreclosure documents without reading them, causing these banks to also halt foreclosures in the 23 states that require judicial involvement to consummate a foreclosure and evict the former homeowner.



The latest? Yesterday, the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ordered the seven largest mortgage lenders in the country to review their foreclosure processes for flaws in their document management systems.



For tips on what this means to those who are facing or have already experienced foreclosure, and think their documents might have been "robo-signed," check out this report we filed when the Ally Financial/GMAC Mortgage foreclosure mill story first broke.
eric seiger do

Sam&#39;s Club to offer iPhone, iPad | iLounge <b>News</b>

iLounge news discussing the Sam's Club to offer iPhone, iPad. Find more iPad news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Good <b>News</b> x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind

Good News x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind. Yale Environment 360, 13 Oct 10. U.S. Offshore Wind Could Provide 20 Percent of Electricity by 2030. U.S. officials calculate that the total potential for offshore wind generation is more than 4000 ...

Online <b>news</b> gatherer Topix aims for election-ad dollars | VentureBeat

Riley McDermid is a contributing reporter to VentureBeat. She was previously the online editor at institutional investing and trading forum ...

eric seiger

There are so many fronts to the foreclosure crisis that it’s now becoming difficult to stay on top of all of them.

One development Monday that didn’t get the attention it deserved is the fact that Bank of America is now eating title insurance liability on foreclosed properties sold by its servicer. Per Bloomberg:

Bank of America’s agreement with Jacksonville, Florida- based Fidelity National calls for the lender to cover the title insurer’s costs in the event of an error in the company’s processing of foreclosure documents, Sadowski said. The bank will notify the insurer in each case that the foreclosure complies with state laws and regulations.

Bank of America is in talks with other title insurers for similar agreements, said Richard Bramhall, the bank’s chief title officer. He declined to name the other companies.

This is a big deal for several reasons:

1. The liability in case of a wrongful foreclosure is large. There is no way for the wronged borrower to get his house back, so title insurance is the only recourse. As Bob Lawless explained in Credit Slips:

…most every (or maybe even every–I’ll let someone else do the 50-state survey) state provides the strongest possible finality protections for deeds obtained through foreclosure sales. We also see similar rules for other judicially supervised sales in other contexts such as sales of personal property subject to a security interest or bankruptcy sales….

Suppose Henry and Helen Homeowner lost their home in foreclosure proceeding, and it has since been purchased by Bill and Betty Buyer. Now, Henry and Helen discover the affidavits in their foreclosure proceeding had some of the very same apparently fraudulent signatures reported in the media. When Henry and Helen complain to the court, the answer should be: “Your complaint is against Deutsche Bank (or whoever foreclosed) and not against Bill and Betty. You can recover damages from Deutsche Bank but not eject Henry and Helen from possession.” In turn, this will mean that that Bill and Betty (or their lender) will not have to look to the title insurer for recovery.

2. This means the large banks now effectively have direct exposure to borrowers for screw ups in foreclosures (note that they did earlier, in theory, but this move shortens the process of the money coming from the bank).

3. The liability is via the bank servicer. Note the Bank of American is now the largest servicer in the US (Wells is a close second) by virtue of having bought Countrywide.

4. Some contend that the risk of clouded title means that title insurers may come to require warranties from banks for all properties sold that has securitized mortgages. As Adam Levitin indicated in a Citigroup report, documentation lapses could “cloud title on not just foreclosed mortgages but on performing mortgages.”

It isn’t hard to see that other banks are likely to be required to take the same step as Bank of America, at least if they want to unload foreclosed property.

It isn’t hard to see where this is going. The biggest servicers are part of TBTF banks. The biggest trustees (the folks who were supposed to make sure that the loans all got to the securitization trust properly) are part of TBTF banks. The major structurer/packagers are now all part of TBTF banks.

Isn’t a concentrated financial services industry grand? Any time they screw up, they are too large to be made to pay for their crimes. The die was cast at the beginning of the Obama administration. It was a critical window of opportunity to take over and put new management in the weakest of the big banks (and probably force them to shed operations too) and they instead were coddled and sent back on their merry way.

I guarantee that the losses, between extend and pretend that will no longer be viable (in particular, the unrealistic marks on second mortgages) and the liabilities resulting from this colossal mess, at least one major bank will be insolvent. But the odds of the new special resolution authority being used? I put the odds at pretty much zero.

Just when it looked like the Ally Financial/GMAC Mortgage robo-signing drama couldn't get any more, well, dramatic -- it did. Last week, the fourth-largest mortgage lender in America revealed that the foreclosure documents for potentially all its foreclosures over the last five years had simply not been read, because the staffer tasked with signing them had been assigned the inhuman job of "reading" and signing over 10,000 documents per month.



More than 50,000 foreclosures, evictions and resales of foreclosed homes on home loans held or serviced by GMAC Mortgage were frozen across 23 states; within the week, the California attorney general had asked GMAC to stop foreclosures in the nation's largest state until the company could prove it was complying with state foreclosure laws, Connecticut's attorney general had requested a court order halting all banks from foreclosing on homes there for 60 days and the attorneys general of Ohio and Florida had initiated investigations into GMAC foreclosures.



This week, though, the debacle flew straight up the food chain of the mortgage lending industry. Executives at JP Morgan Chase and the country's largest mortgage lender, Bank of America, have also confessed to signing tens of thousands of foreclosure documents without reading them, causing these banks to also halt foreclosures in the 23 states that require judicial involvement to consummate a foreclosure and evict the former homeowner.



The latest? Yesterday, the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ordered the seven largest mortgage lenders in the country to review their foreclosure processes for flaws in their document management systems.



For tips on what this means to those who are facing or have already experienced foreclosure, and think their documents might have been "robo-signed," check out this report we filed when the Ally Financial/GMAC Mortgage foreclosure mill story first broke.
skin

and vein center

Sam&#39;s Club to offer iPhone, iPad | iLounge <b>News</b>

iLounge news discussing the Sam's Club to offer iPhone, iPad. Find more iPad news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Good <b>News</b> x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind

Good News x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind. Yale Environment 360, 13 Oct 10. U.S. Offshore Wind Could Provide 20 Percent of Electricity by 2030. U.S. officials calculate that the total potential for offshore wind generation is more than 4000 ...

Online <b>news</b> gatherer Topix aims for election-ad dollars | VentureBeat

Riley McDermid is a contributing reporter to VentureBeat. She was previously the online editor at institutional investing and trading forum ...

Dr. eric seiger

eric seiger

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Sam&#39;s Club to offer iPhone, iPad | iLounge <b>News</b>

iLounge news discussing the Sam's Club to offer iPhone, iPad. Find more iPad news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Good <b>News</b> x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind

Good News x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind. Yale Environment 360, 13 Oct 10. U.S. Offshore Wind Could Provide 20 Percent of Electricity by 2030. U.S. officials calculate that the total potential for offshore wind generation is more than 4000 ...

Online <b>news</b> gatherer Topix aims for election-ad dollars | VentureBeat

Riley McDermid is a contributing reporter to VentureBeat. She was previously the online editor at institutional investing and trading forum ...

eric seiger dermatologist

There are so many fronts to the foreclosure crisis that it’s now becoming difficult to stay on top of all of them.

One development Monday that didn’t get the attention it deserved is the fact that Bank of America is now eating title insurance liability on foreclosed properties sold by its servicer. Per Bloomberg:

Bank of America’s agreement with Jacksonville, Florida- based Fidelity National calls for the lender to cover the title insurer’s costs in the event of an error in the company’s processing of foreclosure documents, Sadowski said. The bank will notify the insurer in each case that the foreclosure complies with state laws and regulations.

Bank of America is in talks with other title insurers for similar agreements, said Richard Bramhall, the bank’s chief title officer. He declined to name the other companies.

This is a big deal for several reasons:

1. The liability in case of a wrongful foreclosure is large. There is no way for the wronged borrower to get his house back, so title insurance is the only recourse. As Bob Lawless explained in Credit Slips:

…most every (or maybe even every–I’ll let someone else do the 50-state survey) state provides the strongest possible finality protections for deeds obtained through foreclosure sales. We also see similar rules for other judicially supervised sales in other contexts such as sales of personal property subject to a security interest or bankruptcy sales….

Suppose Henry and Helen Homeowner lost their home in foreclosure proceeding, and it has since been purchased by Bill and Betty Buyer. Now, Henry and Helen discover the affidavits in their foreclosure proceeding had some of the very same apparently fraudulent signatures reported in the media. When Henry and Helen complain to the court, the answer should be: “Your complaint is against Deutsche Bank (or whoever foreclosed) and not against Bill and Betty. You can recover damages from Deutsche Bank but not eject Henry and Helen from possession.” In turn, this will mean that that Bill and Betty (or their lender) will not have to look to the title insurer for recovery.

2. This means the large banks now effectively have direct exposure to borrowers for screw ups in foreclosures (note that they did earlier, in theory, but this move shortens the process of the money coming from the bank).

3. The liability is via the bank servicer. Note the Bank of American is now the largest servicer in the US (Wells is a close second) by virtue of having bought Countrywide.

4. Some contend that the risk of clouded title means that title insurers may come to require warranties from banks for all properties sold that has securitized mortgages. As Adam Levitin indicated in a Citigroup report, documentation lapses could “cloud title on not just foreclosed mortgages but on performing mortgages.”

It isn’t hard to see that other banks are likely to be required to take the same step as Bank of America, at least if they want to unload foreclosed property.

It isn’t hard to see where this is going. The biggest servicers are part of TBTF banks. The biggest trustees (the folks who were supposed to make sure that the loans all got to the securitization trust properly) are part of TBTF banks. The major structurer/packagers are now all part of TBTF banks.

Isn’t a concentrated financial services industry grand? Any time they screw up, they are too large to be made to pay for their crimes. The die was cast at the beginning of the Obama administration. It was a critical window of opportunity to take over and put new management in the weakest of the big banks (and probably force them to shed operations too) and they instead were coddled and sent back on their merry way.

I guarantee that the losses, between extend and pretend that will no longer be viable (in particular, the unrealistic marks on second mortgages) and the liabilities resulting from this colossal mess, at least one major bank will be insolvent. But the odds of the new special resolution authority being used? I put the odds at pretty much zero.

Just when it looked like the Ally Financial/GMAC Mortgage robo-signing drama couldn't get any more, well, dramatic -- it did. Last week, the fourth-largest mortgage lender in America revealed that the foreclosure documents for potentially all its foreclosures over the last five years had simply not been read, because the staffer tasked with signing them had been assigned the inhuman job of "reading" and signing over 10,000 documents per month.



More than 50,000 foreclosures, evictions and resales of foreclosed homes on home loans held or serviced by GMAC Mortgage were frozen across 23 states; within the week, the California attorney general had asked GMAC to stop foreclosures in the nation's largest state until the company could prove it was complying with state foreclosure laws, Connecticut's attorney general had requested a court order halting all banks from foreclosing on homes there for 60 days and the attorneys general of Ohio and Florida had initiated investigations into GMAC foreclosures.



This week, though, the debacle flew straight up the food chain of the mortgage lending industry. Executives at JP Morgan Chase and the country's largest mortgage lender, Bank of America, have also confessed to signing tens of thousands of foreclosure documents without reading them, causing these banks to also halt foreclosures in the 23 states that require judicial involvement to consummate a foreclosure and evict the former homeowner.



The latest? Yesterday, the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ordered the seven largest mortgage lenders in the country to review their foreclosure processes for flaws in their document management systems.



For tips on what this means to those who are facing or have already experienced foreclosure, and think their documents might have been "robo-signed," check out this report we filed when the Ally Financial/GMAC Mortgage foreclosure mill story first broke.
eric seiger dermatologist

skin

and vein center

Sam&#39;s Club to offer iPhone, iPad | iLounge <b>News</b>

iLounge news discussing the Sam's Club to offer iPhone, iPad. Find more iPad news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Good <b>News</b> x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind

Good News x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind. Yale Environment 360, 13 Oct 10. U.S. Offshore Wind Could Provide 20 Percent of Electricity by 2030. U.S. officials calculate that the total potential for offshore wind generation is more than 4000 ...

Online <b>news</b> gatherer Topix aims for election-ad dollars | VentureBeat

Riley McDermid is a contributing reporter to VentureBeat. She was previously the online editor at institutional investing and trading forum ...

eric seiger dermatologist

eric seiger dermatologist

Sam&#39;s Club to offer iPhone, iPad | iLounge <b>News</b>

iLounge news discussing the Sam's Club to offer iPhone, iPad. Find more iPad news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Good <b>News</b> x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind

Good News x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind. Yale Environment 360, 13 Oct 10. U.S. Offshore Wind Could Provide 20 Percent of Electricity by 2030. U.S. officials calculate that the total potential for offshore wind generation is more than 4000 ...

Online <b>news</b> gatherer Topix aims for election-ad dollars | VentureBeat

Riley McDermid is a contributing reporter to VentureBeat. She was previously the online editor at institutional investing and trading forum ...

eric seiger

Sam&#39;s Club to offer iPhone, iPad | iLounge <b>News</b>

iLounge news discussing the Sam's Club to offer iPhone, iPad. Find more iPad news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Good <b>News</b> x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind

Good News x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind. Yale Environment 360, 13 Oct 10. U.S. Offshore Wind Could Provide 20 Percent of Electricity by 2030. U.S. officials calculate that the total potential for offshore wind generation is more than 4000 ...

Online <b>news</b> gatherer Topix aims for election-ad dollars | VentureBeat

Riley McDermid is a contributing reporter to VentureBeat. She was previously the online editor at institutional investing and trading forum ...

skin

and vein center

Sam&#39;s Club to offer iPhone, iPad | iLounge <b>News</b>

iLounge news discussing the Sam's Club to offer iPhone, iPad. Find more iPad news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Good <b>News</b> x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind

Good News x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind. Yale Environment 360, 13 Oct 10. U.S. Offshore Wind Could Provide 20 Percent of Electricity by 2030. U.S. officials calculate that the total potential for offshore wind generation is more than 4000 ...

Online <b>news</b> gatherer Topix aims for election-ad dollars | VentureBeat

Riley McDermid is a contributing reporter to VentureBeat. She was previously the online editor at institutional investing and trading forum ...

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big seminar 14

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big seminar 14

Sam&#39;s Club to offer iPhone, iPad | iLounge <b>News</b>

iLounge news discussing the Sam's Club to offer iPhone, iPad. Find more iPad news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Good <b>News</b> x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind

Good News x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind. Yale Environment 360, 13 Oct 10. U.S. Offshore Wind Could Provide 20 Percent of Electricity by 2030. U.S. officials calculate that the total potential for offshore wind generation is more than 4000 ...

Online <b>news</b> gatherer Topix aims for election-ad dollars | VentureBeat

Riley McDermid is a contributing reporter to VentureBeat. She was previously the online editor at institutional investing and trading forum ...

big seminar 14

HUD is the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) is part of HUD.

The FHA provides mortgage insurance to specifically reimburse mortgage lenders if a buyer defaults on their mortgage. Lenders can file a claim with the FHA when they are forced to foreclose on an FHA-insured home because the owner has defaulted on the payments. The FHA will reimburse the balance due on the mortgage and convey title of that property to HUD, following certain rigid rules and regulations.

Simply put, a "HUD Home" is a residence acquired as a result of foreclosure on an FHA-insured mortgage loan. When these homes are foreclosed on (and it's happening in record numbers), someone has to inspect, cleanup, secure and manage them through the selling process.

With the number of HUD foreclosures on the market today,property management has become an incredible task for HUD. The organization has a need to manage and sell a sizable inventory of single-family homes like never before.

HUD's Foreclosure Cleanup Arms

HUD has arms in the form of M&M Contractors ("Management and Marketing" Contractors). These M&M Contractors market and manage single-family properties owned by, or in the custody of, HUD.

As a foreclosure cleanup business owner, you need to know the M&M's role because their payment guidelines, mandated by HUD, directly affect what you ultimately get paid in your foreclosure cleanup business.

HUD didn't begin outsourcing the disposition of these properties to the private sector until 1999. HUD currently has contracts with several firms who provide M&M services in several contract areas throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, Guam and the Northern Marianna Islands. The organization has an ongoing need for these services and is building on the success of their existing outsourcing program.

HUD's Frontline

The M&M Contractors are part of the frontline for HUD when it comes to managing these properties.

The M&Ms report to one of four HUD Homeownership Centers (HOC). HOCs are located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Atlanta, Georgia; Denver, Colorado; and Santa Ana, California.

Each HOC is responsible for a designated geographic area.

M&M Contractors are administered by a HUD Contracting Officer (CO) and a HUD Government Technical Representative (GTR) located in the Homeownership Center to which they report.

Remember, as a foreclosure cleanup business owner, you need to know the M&M's role because their payment guidelines, mandated by HUD, directly affect what you ultimately get paid in your foreclosure cleanup business. Even if you are not dealing with HUD homes in great numbers now, HUD's pricing guidelines trickle down in the property preservation industry "pricing expectations."

Good luck with your foreclosure cleanup business!

by Cassandra Black, CEO, Foreclosure Cleanup, LLC and Author of Pricing Guide for Foreclosure Cleaning & Real-Estate Service Businesses: How to Price Jobs for Profit eBook and How to Invest in a Home for Under 10K and Have a $45 Per Month Mortgage Payment!



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Sam&#39;s Club to offer iPhone, iPad | iLounge <b>News</b>

iLounge news discussing the Sam's Club to offer iPhone, iPad. Find more iPad news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Good <b>News</b> x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind

Good News x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind. Yale Environment 360, 13 Oct 10. U.S. Offshore Wind Could Provide 20 Percent of Electricity by 2030. U.S. officials calculate that the total potential for offshore wind generation is more than 4000 ...

Online <b>news</b> gatherer Topix aims for election-ad dollars | VentureBeat

Riley McDermid is a contributing reporter to VentureBeat. She was previously the online editor at institutional investing and trading forum ...

big seminar 14

Sam&#39;s Club to offer iPhone, iPad | iLounge <b>News</b>

iLounge news discussing the Sam's Club to offer iPhone, iPad. Find more iPad news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Good <b>News</b> x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind

Good News x2 for U.S. Offshore Wind. Yale Environment 360, 13 Oct 10. U.S. Offshore Wind Could Provide 20 Percent of Electricity by 2030. U.S. officials calculate that the total potential for offshore wind generation is more than 4000 ...

Online <b>news</b> gatherer Topix aims for election-ad dollars | VentureBeat

Riley McDermid is a contributing reporter to VentureBeat. She was previously the online editor at institutional investing and trading forum ...

big seminar 14

Making Money Without

some things need to be re-read..

Mark E Hoffer Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:04 am

QOTD:

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. —John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (13 December 1935)

Robespierre Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:11 am

@constantnormal Says:

September 23rd, 2010 at 10:36 am

“This is where we are heading, in our journey to reshape the US into the world’s largest banana republic.”

I think it is becoming more like a feudal system than a banana republic.

Arequipa01 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:14 am

The De Soto interview is interesting and embedded in it is an interesting tidbit:

“Fink: This is how the de Soto model works. Property ownership allows poor people to obtain credit, amass capital, and climb out of poverty. Legal reforms make all of that possible. Right now in most developing countries, a morass of laws and bureaucracy keeps the poor from being able to gain title to their property, register their businesses and secure loans.

But de Soto’s ideas have run up against some hard realities. Governments have tended to implement only some of the reforms he champions. And few Peruvian shanty dwellers have been able or willing to borrow against their homes. Most banks don’t extend credit to owners of straw huts and rickety wooden shacks. And taking out a loan is risky for the poor. The owners of the garment factory de Soto and I visited have taken on considerable debt.

De Soto: “About $114,000.”

Fink: They’re paying a high interest rate.

De Soto: “Their interest rates are 2% per month.”

Fink: And they’re worried about keeping up with the payments. Less than a year ago, the factory operated at full capacity. Now it’s at just a quarter of that. As we drive away from the factory, de Soto questions what the future holds for these entrepreneurs.

De Soto: “They may have gone in over their heads. We don’t know.”

The other side of that coin is indebtedness. “obtain credit, amass capital” It’s just that easy! why didn’t I think of that.

You see, while I am very much in favor of improving the titling of property in Peru*, but the assumption that there is a liquid market for properties in an area like Huaycán is unwarranted. There is not. So, you secure a loan with a bank and pledge your property in an illiquid market. Hmmm, would any of you all be interested in that?

* This is a fascinating reality to study and some bright United Statesian kid in CRE should be figuring out how his/her organization can participate in the CRE boom in Lima.

rktbrkr Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:19 am

Real systemic risk!

“We’re not just talking about isolated incidents of problems with foreclosures, we’re talking systemic,”

GMAC suspends foreclosure evictions and sales of seized property

By KIMBERLY MILLER

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Foreclosure evictions and homeowner lockouts have been halted by Ally Financial Inc.’s GMAC Mortgage in 23 states including Florida as the nation’s fifth-largest home loan servicer addresses legal challenges to its foreclosure procedures.

A two-page memo dated Sept. 17 and marked “urgent” told brokers to immediately stop evictions, cash-for-key transactions, lockouts and to suspend sales of properties already taken back by the bank in foreclosure.

The memo, first reported by Bloomberg news service, comes at the same time the Tampa-based Florida Default Law Group has been withdrawing legal affidavits in its GMAC foreclosure cases under “candor to the court” rules acknowledging previously submitted information may have been inaccurate.

St. Petersburg defense attorney Matt Weidner, who is handling a case in which a GMAC affidavit was withdrawn last week, called the freeze “staggering.”

“I suspect they are recognizing they have a really big problem,” Weidner said. “I think they are afraid the foreclosure judgments may be voidable.”

If that’s the case, Weidner said it won’t be just GMAC redoing their foreclosure procedures.

“We’re not just talking about isolated incidents of problems with foreclosures, we’re talking systemic,” he said.

rktbrkr Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:21 am

It sounds like these courts are malfunctioning and need to call a “time out”

ashpelham2 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:25 am

Look, I work at a fairly large regional bank in the Southern US. What happened with this guy started out as someone just blindly pushing buttons and paper, and then morphed into a complete failure of all possible safeguards to make sure something like this couldn’t happen. So, there is a lot of blame to go around, and yeah, this guy is probably owed some kind of restitution for the hassle and crap he’s been through. Should he, or any lawyer, be made wealthy because of it? No, but the courts failed to protect this guy in the original foreclosure process. Why should we expect the courts to get it right when he sues the hell out of B of A?

Banking has been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator at this level. All the brains are making huge bucks in the stuff that got us in the toilet to begin with.

Darkness Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:29 am

I didn’t get what the title company was doing in all this. I can see the courts processing the foreclosures out of order, there is a long tradition of courts barely glancing at foreclosure orders and really, no one expects them to do otherwise, but the title company really screwed up here royally. All of these parties are getting paid their cut to provide a double check on the process and are doing squat. Parasites, the lot of them.

WFTA Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:37 am

BR,

There you go encouraging those pesky plaintiffs’ attorneys again when I’ve been told for the last twenty years that’s why healthcare is unaffordable. Think what this will do for foreclosure inflation!

Matt SF Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 12:10 pm

One word: Pillory.

Sentence any and all of these corrupt morons to 1 year of mandatory public shame. Only way this nonsense is going to stop is if the anger of the masses is correctly harnessed and directed at those who are propagating the crimes. Letting them pay a fine and *not* admit wrongdoing will only perpetuate the cycle.

Oh, and the afflicted home owner(s) should be given the option of flinging rotten eggs and tomatoes if he or she chooses.

louis Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 12:36 pm

This just shows what you are dealing with and why none of the programs for housing are working.

jjay Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 12:40 pm

“Suck it up, Grodensky!’

All my love,

Charlie Munger

bergsten Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 12:43 pm

That’s it. I’m starting my own bank. It isn’t all that hard, you just have to fill out some state form or another.

Brendan Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 12:57 pm

I love the irony that we have comments on this blog by people who are screaming about how it’s just unacceptable that the banking industry isn’t doing its due diligence before foreclosing… and then making completely false statements because they haven’t done their own due diligence.

ACORN’s “flunkies” were acquitted of “cooperating with a prostitution scheme” as the videos were shown to be “severely edited” by investigators (for lack of a better resource I’ll use Wikipedia):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN_2009_undercover_videos_controversy

And also healthcare is not unaffordable due to litigation costs, as has been shown time and time again. Here’s a very recent study pegging the cost at 2.4% of total costs; see:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/200462.php

I don’t think you can reasonably say that is to blame for the high cost of healthcare.

Pot meet kettle! You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts!

contrabandista13 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:01 pm

Sounds to me like… “ALL BETS ARE OFF….”

I have a good friend that got even for all of you, with BoA to the tune of 3 million….

He legally scammed them for over 3 million…. He told me that it was like shooting fish in a barrel and they cooperated all the way to the gallows…. Two of their VPs got their asses canned for it….

Bravo to my friend Tim B…..

Best regards,

Econolicious

Brendan Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:01 pm

P.S. I recognize that the health-care comment may have been tongue-in-cheek, but it wasn’t really made very clear…

poppysmic Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:45 pm

That’s brilliant by the Bank. They made/ will make money on the deal. Have you ever had a bank error in YOUR favor? Of course not. All credit card fraud can be stopped in almost an instant but they make money on the float. The vendor eats the loss, you make payment on the error until it clears, then they pass on the cost to Ins. or consumer. It sucks for honest citizens, but it’s the bottom line that matters….What’s the line? ” Greed is God’?

Space_Cowboy_NW Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:45 pm

TX Capitial Punishment is to ____________ as FL Foreclosure Mills are to ______________

SOP in the Legal environment: ”Win some, lose some, bill ‘em early & often”

Only guilty people go to prison so remember:” Admit Nothing, Deny Everything, and promptly call your counsel.”

Your mileage may vary…..

APBERUSDISVET Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:50 pm

Where was the title company in this mess? Or were they the corrupt instigator?

WFTA Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:57 pm

Brendan, buddy. Lighten up. I’m on your side.

We need a sense of humor, cause I’m afeared it a hard rain gonna fall.

willid3 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 2:07 pm

and i thought many were big on property rights. oh i forgot, its property rights for corporations, TBTF and others. just not for the people

MinnItMan Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 2:53 pm

A title company should have closed the cash purchase. If the buyer (Grodensky) didn’t use one, his bad. Penny-wise, pound-foolishness.

It’s worth pointing out that cash purchasers usually mean prospective slum-lords, but I don’t know that here. Alsos, his credit should not be affected. The loan was in the name of the former owner.

Not excusing anything, but I suspect the facts would show some strange bedfellows in this story in a fuller reporting.

bergsten Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 2:58 pm

This box just popped up, asking if I wanted to participate in a TBP survey.

I like Barry, so I figured, “why not”?

The first question asked for my age. Fine. The second asked for (something along the lines of) my interests.

The first choice was “pet care.”

Sorry, but that’s when I bailed on the survey.

Is this legitimate or another ad that’s taken over the site?

formerlawyer Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 3:58 pm

In my former jurisdiction and others, fraudsters would often take out a mortgage using forged identity. The process involved looking for (preferably vacant) properties without mortgages which was easily done from public records.

From that, forged identity for the owner would be obtained and a mortgage placed on the land with the fraudsters seeing a lawyer to finalize the documents. The fraudsters would set up a bank account from which payments could be withdrawn and place just enough money (ie. 6 months mortgage payments) to fund the mortgage. Often they would then move the address for service of record to a fictional address so that notification of the true owner would be forestalled. Thereafter, the mortgage proceeds would be laundered – usually by way of casinos on Indian lands or other mechanisms.

While personal service would be preferred, substitutional service on the lands or in a newspaper was commonly allowed in foreclosures. Voila – foreclosure once the money ran out.

While that is not the case here from my understanding this is not unknown.

willid3 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 4:05 pm

and foreclosure is controlled by the states. Fed have nothing to do with it (short of bankruptcy being involved).

Casual Onlooker Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 5:10 pm

I find the arguments that mistakes like BofA are just simple oversight, and one off errors that did little harm. From a lot of the various stories out there, from banks that “lose paperwork” to people getting lost in voice mail hell just trying to find a real person, much less a person a person that is not reading a script off his computer, speaks volumes as to the increasing chaos in the system.

To add to GMAC story, NPR yesterday aired a segment on this, and some of the details are rather troubling. http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=130052495

From the story…

————

Chris Immel is an attorney at Ice Legal, a foreclosure defense firm in West Palm Beach, Florida. He conducted a deposition with a GMAC employee named Jeffrey Stephan. Immel says his job was to sign foreclosure documents.

Mr. CHRISTOPHER IMMEL (Attorney, Ice Legal): We took his deposition. And in taking it, he pretty much admitted to signing, you know, he said approximately 10,000 documents a month.

KEITH: Attorneys like Immel have taken to calling these employees at loan servicing firms robo-signers.

———

I mean really, 10,000 documents a month by a single person… where is the due diligence in that? How does this not rise to the level of a endemic problem that needs addressing? That’s 62.5 documents signed an hour, or one a minute.

Brady Dennis Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 5:47 pm

Robo-signer’ played quiet role in huge number of foreclosures

The robo-signer lives on a quiet street in this small town an hour’s drive northwest of Philadelphia.

His modest two-story house, for which he paid $118,000, sits on a corner lot just down the street from the local Moose Lodge and an all-night diner. A weathered Chrysler Concorde is parked in the driveway, and a Toyota Camry sits by the curb.

Many large mortgage lenders have come to rely on a relative handful of so-called robo-signers such as Jeffrey Stephan, 41, to attest to the accuracy of thousands of home foreclosure documents across the country. These workers are not the Wall Street masterminds who created ever more complex mortgage-backed securities and fueled the subprime mortgage boom, but rather “affidavit slaves” with modest incomes and mountainous workloads.

Their actions are leading lawyers representing foreclosed homeowners to claim that lenders have no legal standing if the filings weren’t reviewed and verified, and to argue that the cases should be thrown out.

Herb2 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 7:42 pm

In the Philippines when Marcos declared martial law, I noticed that much more attention and money flowed into elections of judges than into elections of senators, which was contrary to my experience in the US. Subsequently I learned that judges decided which phony paperwork was authentic when title to a property was contested.

The particulars are different, but we drift in a similar direction.

Home buying on a Saturday « Tim Hedden's Blog Says:



September 25th, 2010 at 7:01 pm

other day I read a fairly enthusiastic Barry Ritholtz post entitled Man without Mortgage Loses Home in Foreclosure. Basically, the Florida court system is so in the groove of foreclosing on properties, they are

doloresflynn Says:



September 26th, 2010 at 3:45 pm

Please set a standard here !

As soon as you uthrow out the f-bomb, everyone thinks it is their cue to trash the place.

Morality belongs to the financial sector as well as personal, and if you are educated, you can get your point across very well without vulgar puctuations.

Florida’s Foreclosures Nightmare | The Big Picture Says:



September 29th, 2010 at 2:53 pm

Man without Mortgage Loses Home in Foreclosure (September 23rd,

BofA’s unfunny foreclosure tricks | Anne-Marie Wurzel, P.A., Real Estate Agent - Winter Springs, FL Real Estate Office Says:



September 30th, 2010 at 11:05 am

seems. Barry Ritholtz says at his blog that the only way the banks will ever learn is if they lose big judgments in court – a notion that seems to be borne out by another aspect of the Schroit

stopGOVTwaste Says:



October 2nd, 2010 at 1:16 am

So if they come once with fake documents, do they have free reign to come back and try again with NEW fake docs? The mortgage MUST remain together with the note but MERS prevents that from happening. Bifurcation =’s off book securities transactions.

What they don’t want to tell you is that the insurance taken out on the loan pool at 30x value of pool (conservatively) has paid off – EXTINGUISHED – the loans in the underlying pool, many times over (AIG, AMBAC, MGIC, TARP, ETC). But wait a second, weren’t these the same loans that were supposed to be “recorded” in public land records per the terms of the Pooling & Servicing Agreement (PSA) and the Mortgage “contract” (see section 20 of the standard Fannie/Freddie instrument).

So if the chain of custody was never recorded, then the trusts set up to hold the loan pools actually held “nothing but air” – if they even existed at all.

You can’t collect on a debt that has been paid off, that is fraud. Plus, the controlling aspects of the PSA void the sale of the asset under FAS 140, in addition the REMIC will lose it’s tax deferred status under IRS Code. You cannot commit securities fraud, tax fraud, violate a plethora of federal and state lending and consumers laws and get away with it scott free… can you? The crime is mortgage backed securities and the crime scene is our public land records.

Enjoy the video (below) and have a great weekend!

Slowing the Runaway Foreclosure Train | The Big Picture Says:



October 4th, 2010 at 7:26 am

we have seen, homeowners without mortgages have lost their home to foreclosure. That this legal impossibility actually occurred  reveals the

Boston Real Estate Blog : Blog Archive : Slowing down the foreclosure assembly line Says:



October 4th, 2010 at 9:53 am

we have seen, homeowners without mortgages have lost their home to foreclosure. That this legal impossibility actually occurred  reveals the

Are WSJ OpEd Writers Clueless or Liars? | The Big Picture Says:



October 11th, 2010 at 11:10 am

has been widely circulated and discussed in the media, Man’s home sold out from under him in foreclosure mistake. The

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This was probably inevitable: the minute that Dodd-Frank cracked down on the fees charged by credit cards aimed at students, some other bright financial innovation would crop up. This time, a debit card aimed at students. Which carries lots of fees. Ylan Mui reports that a company called Higher One has started signing up colleges around the country, taking on the burden of providing cash to students. In return, it gets lots of fees:

Students say several of the fees associated with Higher One’s card are particularly irksome, including the $19 inactivity fee, a 50-cent charge for using a PIN to make a purchase rather than a signature, and a $2.50 fee for using other banks’ ATMs…

Higher One said that only 1 percent of customers have been charged an inactivity fee and that more than half are charged the 50-cent fee only once. All fees are listed on Higher One’s Web site, along with tips on avoiding them.

“We have a big effort with educating students on how to use the account,” Smith said. “We’re very passionate about financial literacy.”

If the fees are listed on Higher One’s website, they’re not exactly prominent. I did find this page, eventually, via this blog entry, but it just says that “when you swipe & sign, you won’t be charged the PIN-based transaction fee”. I haven’t been able to find a page showing a 50-cent transaction fee anywhere*, although I did manage to find this page, showing a $25 fee for domestic wire transfers and a $50 fee for international wire transfers. “Higher One offers less costly alternatives for transferring funds”, it says, without giving any indication what they might be; I suspect that what they’re talking about is transfers to or from people who have already registered somehow with Higher One.

It should go without saying that any firm which is “very passionate about financial literacy” would encourage, rather than penalize, simple, cheap and safe PIN-debit transactions. It would not give students a debit card and then tell them that if they want to avoid fees they should select the “credit” option rather than the “debit” option when they come to pay.

And I can’t think of any good reason to charge a $19 inactivity fee to people who haven’t used their cards in 9 months.

The fact is that students are often very naive when it comes to money, and it’s easy to gouge them once or twice before they learn that banks are not necessarily on their side. If you can get your card accepted by a majority of freshmen every year, and then come up with all manner of weird fees to hit them with, that’s a great way of making money out of ignorance.

Meanwhile, all students should have a bank account: giving them a debit card instead only serves to maximize the number of unbanked students. So while I’m sure cards like this are attractive to colleges, it would be great if either the colleges or else the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started being a lot more critical of them. Prepaid cards only ever make sense if the alternative is being completely unbanked; that should not ever be the case for students.

*At Southern Oregon University, Higher One agreed to waive the 50-cent PIN-debit charge, but only if there was a simultaneous “swipe-and-sign” campaign. If the campaign is unsuccessful and students do the sensible thing by using PIN debit, then the university can be charged $2 per student for “PIN fee elimination”.

Update: Higher One’s Donald Smith responds:

Higher One was founded 10 years ago by three college students (undergraduates at the time) who were looking for streamlining the way financial aid refunds were distributed to students. Today we work with more than 675 campuses across the country, have a 97% client retention rating, and an A+ rating with the BBB.

The OneAccount is Higher One’s optional, no minimum balance, no monthly fee, FDIC-Insured checking account created by students for students. We do not offer a stored value card. We are very open with our fee schedule. We post it on every program website for all to access, explain each fee, discuss how to avoid each fee, and provide students with a web page that tells them how to use the account for free (which you’ve already found). Because of this, we believe that our customers pay less than half the amount in fees that the average bank checking account customer pays per year.

Two of the fees you referenced in your blog are the PIN fee and the Abandoned Account Fee. The PIN fee is easily avoided by choosing a signature based transaction at the checkout. The majority of students uses it in this manner and is in turn protected by MasterCard’s Zero Liability Policy against fraudulent charges (a safer way of purchasing than a PIN based transaction). We do not have an inactivity fee on our fee schedule – we don’t penalize students who do not use their accounts. We do have an Abandoned Account Fee of up to $19, for those who have abandoned their accounts, but this has been charged to less than 1% of all OneAccount holders in our company’s history because of our proactive outreach plan.

Higher One offers no instruments of credit. As a matter of fact, we’re generally in favor of initiatives restricting students’ access to credit cards and promoting financial literacy. This is why we offer a full range of financial literacy resources along with the services we provide.

I particularly dislike the implication, here, that PIN-based transactions are unsafe. They’re not; they’re just less lucrative, in terms of interchange fees, than signature-based transactions.

eric seiger

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Verizon iPhone 4 | Adan News | New iPhone Info Says: October 10th, 2010 at 10:03 pm. Verizon iPhone 4. It's coming soon…or is it? I remember back in March, right before the end of the first quarter the WSJ said that the Verizon ...

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'American Idol's Crystal Bowersox married musician Brian Walker on Sunday, October 10, 2010, in Chicago, and will celebrate their anniversary on 10/10/10 along with the other approximated 40000 lovebirds who said 'I Do'

eric seiger


some things need to be re-read..

Mark E Hoffer Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:04 am

QOTD:

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. —John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (13 December 1935)

Robespierre Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:11 am

@constantnormal Says:

September 23rd, 2010 at 10:36 am

“This is where we are heading, in our journey to reshape the US into the world’s largest banana republic.”

I think it is becoming more like a feudal system than a banana republic.

Arequipa01 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:14 am

The De Soto interview is interesting and embedded in it is an interesting tidbit:

“Fink: This is how the de Soto model works. Property ownership allows poor people to obtain credit, amass capital, and climb out of poverty. Legal reforms make all of that possible. Right now in most developing countries, a morass of laws and bureaucracy keeps the poor from being able to gain title to their property, register their businesses and secure loans.

But de Soto’s ideas have run up against some hard realities. Governments have tended to implement only some of the reforms he champions. And few Peruvian shanty dwellers have been able or willing to borrow against their homes. Most banks don’t extend credit to owners of straw huts and rickety wooden shacks. And taking out a loan is risky for the poor. The owners of the garment factory de Soto and I visited have taken on considerable debt.

De Soto: “About $114,000.”

Fink: They’re paying a high interest rate.

De Soto: “Their interest rates are 2% per month.”

Fink: And they’re worried about keeping up with the payments. Less than a year ago, the factory operated at full capacity. Now it’s at just a quarter of that. As we drive away from the factory, de Soto questions what the future holds for these entrepreneurs.

De Soto: “They may have gone in over their heads. We don’t know.”

The other side of that coin is indebtedness. “obtain credit, amass capital” It’s just that easy! why didn’t I think of that.

You see, while I am very much in favor of improving the titling of property in Peru*, but the assumption that there is a liquid market for properties in an area like Huaycán is unwarranted. There is not. So, you secure a loan with a bank and pledge your property in an illiquid market. Hmmm, would any of you all be interested in that?

* This is a fascinating reality to study and some bright United Statesian kid in CRE should be figuring out how his/her organization can participate in the CRE boom in Lima.

rktbrkr Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:19 am

Real systemic risk!

“We’re not just talking about isolated incidents of problems with foreclosures, we’re talking systemic,”

GMAC suspends foreclosure evictions and sales of seized property

By KIMBERLY MILLER

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Foreclosure evictions and homeowner lockouts have been halted by Ally Financial Inc.’s GMAC Mortgage in 23 states including Florida as the nation’s fifth-largest home loan servicer addresses legal challenges to its foreclosure procedures.

A two-page memo dated Sept. 17 and marked “urgent” told brokers to immediately stop evictions, cash-for-key transactions, lockouts and to suspend sales of properties already taken back by the bank in foreclosure.

The memo, first reported by Bloomberg news service, comes at the same time the Tampa-based Florida Default Law Group has been withdrawing legal affidavits in its GMAC foreclosure cases under “candor to the court” rules acknowledging previously submitted information may have been inaccurate.

St. Petersburg defense attorney Matt Weidner, who is handling a case in which a GMAC affidavit was withdrawn last week, called the freeze “staggering.”

“I suspect they are recognizing they have a really big problem,” Weidner said. “I think they are afraid the foreclosure judgments may be voidable.”

If that’s the case, Weidner said it won’t be just GMAC redoing their foreclosure procedures.

“We’re not just talking about isolated incidents of problems with foreclosures, we’re talking systemic,” he said.

rktbrkr Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:21 am

It sounds like these courts are malfunctioning and need to call a “time out”

ashpelham2 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:25 am

Look, I work at a fairly large regional bank in the Southern US. What happened with this guy started out as someone just blindly pushing buttons and paper, and then morphed into a complete failure of all possible safeguards to make sure something like this couldn’t happen. So, there is a lot of blame to go around, and yeah, this guy is probably owed some kind of restitution for the hassle and crap he’s been through. Should he, or any lawyer, be made wealthy because of it? No, but the courts failed to protect this guy in the original foreclosure process. Why should we expect the courts to get it right when he sues the hell out of B of A?

Banking has been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator at this level. All the brains are making huge bucks in the stuff that got us in the toilet to begin with.

Darkness Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:29 am

I didn’t get what the title company was doing in all this. I can see the courts processing the foreclosures out of order, there is a long tradition of courts barely glancing at foreclosure orders and really, no one expects them to do otherwise, but the title company really screwed up here royally. All of these parties are getting paid their cut to provide a double check on the process and are doing squat. Parasites, the lot of them.

WFTA Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:37 am

BR,

There you go encouraging those pesky plaintiffs’ attorneys again when I’ve been told for the last twenty years that’s why healthcare is unaffordable. Think what this will do for foreclosure inflation!

Matt SF Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 12:10 pm

One word: Pillory.

Sentence any and all of these corrupt morons to 1 year of mandatory public shame. Only way this nonsense is going to stop is if the anger of the masses is correctly harnessed and directed at those who are propagating the crimes. Letting them pay a fine and *not* admit wrongdoing will only perpetuate the cycle.

Oh, and the afflicted home owner(s) should be given the option of flinging rotten eggs and tomatoes if he or she chooses.

louis Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 12:36 pm

This just shows what you are dealing with and why none of the programs for housing are working.

jjay Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 12:40 pm

“Suck it up, Grodensky!’

All my love,

Charlie Munger

bergsten Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 12:43 pm

That’s it. I’m starting my own bank. It isn’t all that hard, you just have to fill out some state form or another.

Brendan Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 12:57 pm

I love the irony that we have comments on this blog by people who are screaming about how it’s just unacceptable that the banking industry isn’t doing its due diligence before foreclosing… and then making completely false statements because they haven’t done their own due diligence.

ACORN’s “flunkies” were acquitted of “cooperating with a prostitution scheme” as the videos were shown to be “severely edited” by investigators (for lack of a better resource I’ll use Wikipedia):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN_2009_undercover_videos_controversy

And also healthcare is not unaffordable due to litigation costs, as has been shown time and time again. Here’s a very recent study pegging the cost at 2.4% of total costs; see:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/200462.php

I don’t think you can reasonably say that is to blame for the high cost of healthcare.

Pot meet kettle! You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts!

contrabandista13 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:01 pm

Sounds to me like… “ALL BETS ARE OFF….”

I have a good friend that got even for all of you, with BoA to the tune of 3 million….

He legally scammed them for over 3 million…. He told me that it was like shooting fish in a barrel and they cooperated all the way to the gallows…. Two of their VPs got their asses canned for it….

Bravo to my friend Tim B…..

Best regards,

Econolicious

Brendan Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:01 pm

P.S. I recognize that the health-care comment may have been tongue-in-cheek, but it wasn’t really made very clear…

poppysmic Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:45 pm

That’s brilliant by the Bank. They made/ will make money on the deal. Have you ever had a bank error in YOUR favor? Of course not. All credit card fraud can be stopped in almost an instant but they make money on the float. The vendor eats the loss, you make payment on the error until it clears, then they pass on the cost to Ins. or consumer. It sucks for honest citizens, but it’s the bottom line that matters….What’s the line? ” Greed is God’?

Space_Cowboy_NW Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:45 pm

TX Capitial Punishment is to ____________ as FL Foreclosure Mills are to ______________

SOP in the Legal environment: ”Win some, lose some, bill ‘em early & often”

Only guilty people go to prison so remember:” Admit Nothing, Deny Everything, and promptly call your counsel.”

Your mileage may vary…..

APBERUSDISVET Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:50 pm

Where was the title company in this mess? Or were they the corrupt instigator?

WFTA Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:57 pm

Brendan, buddy. Lighten up. I’m on your side.

We need a sense of humor, cause I’m afeared it a hard rain gonna fall.

willid3 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 2:07 pm

and i thought many were big on property rights. oh i forgot, its property rights for corporations, TBTF and others. just not for the people

MinnItMan Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 2:53 pm

A title company should have closed the cash purchase. If the buyer (Grodensky) didn’t use one, his bad. Penny-wise, pound-foolishness.

It’s worth pointing out that cash purchasers usually mean prospective slum-lords, but I don’t know that here. Alsos, his credit should not be affected. The loan was in the name of the former owner.

Not excusing anything, but I suspect the facts would show some strange bedfellows in this story in a fuller reporting.

bergsten Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 2:58 pm

This box just popped up, asking if I wanted to participate in a TBP survey.

I like Barry, so I figured, “why not”?

The first question asked for my age. Fine. The second asked for (something along the lines of) my interests.

The first choice was “pet care.”

Sorry, but that’s when I bailed on the survey.

Is this legitimate or another ad that’s taken over the site?

formerlawyer Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 3:58 pm

In my former jurisdiction and others, fraudsters would often take out a mortgage using forged identity. The process involved looking for (preferably vacant) properties without mortgages which was easily done from public records.

From that, forged identity for the owner would be obtained and a mortgage placed on the land with the fraudsters seeing a lawyer to finalize the documents. The fraudsters would set up a bank account from which payments could be withdrawn and place just enough money (ie. 6 months mortgage payments) to fund the mortgage. Often they would then move the address for service of record to a fictional address so that notification of the true owner would be forestalled. Thereafter, the mortgage proceeds would be laundered – usually by way of casinos on Indian lands or other mechanisms.

While personal service would be preferred, substitutional service on the lands or in a newspaper was commonly allowed in foreclosures. Voila – foreclosure once the money ran out.

While that is not the case here from my understanding this is not unknown.

willid3 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 4:05 pm

and foreclosure is controlled by the states. Fed have nothing to do with it (short of bankruptcy being involved).

Casual Onlooker Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 5:10 pm

I find the arguments that mistakes like BofA are just simple oversight, and one off errors that did little harm. From a lot of the various stories out there, from banks that “lose paperwork” to people getting lost in voice mail hell just trying to find a real person, much less a person a person that is not reading a script off his computer, speaks volumes as to the increasing chaos in the system.

To add to GMAC story, NPR yesterday aired a segment on this, and some of the details are rather troubling. http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=130052495

From the story…

————

Chris Immel is an attorney at Ice Legal, a foreclosure defense firm in West Palm Beach, Florida. He conducted a deposition with a GMAC employee named Jeffrey Stephan. Immel says his job was to sign foreclosure documents.

Mr. CHRISTOPHER IMMEL (Attorney, Ice Legal): We took his deposition. And in taking it, he pretty much admitted to signing, you know, he said approximately 10,000 documents a month.

KEITH: Attorneys like Immel have taken to calling these employees at loan servicing firms robo-signers.

———

I mean really, 10,000 documents a month by a single person… where is the due diligence in that? How does this not rise to the level of a endemic problem that needs addressing? That’s 62.5 documents signed an hour, or one a minute.

Brady Dennis Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 5:47 pm

Robo-signer’ played quiet role in huge number of foreclosures

The robo-signer lives on a quiet street in this small town an hour’s drive northwest of Philadelphia.

His modest two-story house, for which he paid $118,000, sits on a corner lot just down the street from the local Moose Lodge and an all-night diner. A weathered Chrysler Concorde is parked in the driveway, and a Toyota Camry sits by the curb.

Many large mortgage lenders have come to rely on a relative handful of so-called robo-signers such as Jeffrey Stephan, 41, to attest to the accuracy of thousands of home foreclosure documents across the country. These workers are not the Wall Street masterminds who created ever more complex mortgage-backed securities and fueled the subprime mortgage boom, but rather “affidavit slaves” with modest incomes and mountainous workloads.

Their actions are leading lawyers representing foreclosed homeowners to claim that lenders have no legal standing if the filings weren’t reviewed and verified, and to argue that the cases should be thrown out.

Herb2 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 7:42 pm

In the Philippines when Marcos declared martial law, I noticed that much more attention and money flowed into elections of judges than into elections of senators, which was contrary to my experience in the US. Subsequently I learned that judges decided which phony paperwork was authentic when title to a property was contested.

The particulars are different, but we drift in a similar direction.

Home buying on a Saturday « Tim Hedden's Blog Says:



September 25th, 2010 at 7:01 pm

other day I read a fairly enthusiastic Barry Ritholtz post entitled Man without Mortgage Loses Home in Foreclosure. Basically, the Florida court system is so in the groove of foreclosing on properties, they are

doloresflynn Says:



September 26th, 2010 at 3:45 pm

Please set a standard here !

As soon as you uthrow out the f-bomb, everyone thinks it is their cue to trash the place.

Morality belongs to the financial sector as well as personal, and if you are educated, you can get your point across very well without vulgar puctuations.

Florida’s Foreclosures Nightmare | The Big Picture Says:



September 29th, 2010 at 2:53 pm

Man without Mortgage Loses Home in Foreclosure (September 23rd,

BofA’s unfunny foreclosure tricks | Anne-Marie Wurzel, P.A., Real Estate Agent - Winter Springs, FL Real Estate Office Says:



September 30th, 2010 at 11:05 am

seems. Barry Ritholtz says at his blog that the only way the banks will ever learn is if they lose big judgments in court – a notion that seems to be borne out by another aspect of the Schroit

stopGOVTwaste Says:



October 2nd, 2010 at 1:16 am

So if they come once with fake documents, do they have free reign to come back and try again with NEW fake docs? The mortgage MUST remain together with the note but MERS prevents that from happening. Bifurcation =’s off book securities transactions.

What they don’t want to tell you is that the insurance taken out on the loan pool at 30x value of pool (conservatively) has paid off – EXTINGUISHED – the loans in the underlying pool, many times over (AIG, AMBAC, MGIC, TARP, ETC). But wait a second, weren’t these the same loans that were supposed to be “recorded” in public land records per the terms of the Pooling & Servicing Agreement (PSA) and the Mortgage “contract” (see section 20 of the standard Fannie/Freddie instrument).

So if the chain of custody was never recorded, then the trusts set up to hold the loan pools actually held “nothing but air” – if they even existed at all.

You can’t collect on a debt that has been paid off, that is fraud. Plus, the controlling aspects of the PSA void the sale of the asset under FAS 140, in addition the REMIC will lose it’s tax deferred status under IRS Code. You cannot commit securities fraud, tax fraud, violate a plethora of federal and state lending and consumers laws and get away with it scott free… can you? The crime is mortgage backed securities and the crime scene is our public land records.

Enjoy the video (below) and have a great weekend!

Slowing the Runaway Foreclosure Train | The Big Picture Says:



October 4th, 2010 at 7:26 am

we have seen, homeowners without mortgages have lost their home to foreclosure. That this legal impossibility actually occurred  reveals the

Boston Real Estate Blog : Blog Archive : Slowing down the foreclosure assembly line Says:



October 4th, 2010 at 9:53 am

we have seen, homeowners without mortgages have lost their home to foreclosure. That this legal impossibility actually occurred  reveals the

Are WSJ OpEd Writers Clueless or Liars? | The Big Picture Says:



October 11th, 2010 at 11:10 am

has been widely circulated and discussed in the media, Man’s home sold out from under him in foreclosure mistake. The

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This was probably inevitable: the minute that Dodd-Frank cracked down on the fees charged by credit cards aimed at students, some other bright financial innovation would crop up. This time, a debit card aimed at students. Which carries lots of fees. Ylan Mui reports that a company called Higher One has started signing up colleges around the country, taking on the burden of providing cash to students. In return, it gets lots of fees:

Students say several of the fees associated with Higher One’s card are particularly irksome, including the $19 inactivity fee, a 50-cent charge for using a PIN to make a purchase rather than a signature, and a $2.50 fee for using other banks’ ATMs…

Higher One said that only 1 percent of customers have been charged an inactivity fee and that more than half are charged the 50-cent fee only once. All fees are listed on Higher One’s Web site, along with tips on avoiding them.

“We have a big effort with educating students on how to use the account,” Smith said. “We’re very passionate about financial literacy.”

If the fees are listed on Higher One’s website, they’re not exactly prominent. I did find this page, eventually, via this blog entry, but it just says that “when you swipe & sign, you won’t be charged the PIN-based transaction fee”. I haven’t been able to find a page showing a 50-cent transaction fee anywhere*, although I did manage to find this page, showing a $25 fee for domestic wire transfers and a $50 fee for international wire transfers. “Higher One offers less costly alternatives for transferring funds”, it says, without giving any indication what they might be; I suspect that what they’re talking about is transfers to or from people who have already registered somehow with Higher One.

It should go without saying that any firm which is “very passionate about financial literacy” would encourage, rather than penalize, simple, cheap and safe PIN-debit transactions. It would not give students a debit card and then tell them that if they want to avoid fees they should select the “credit” option rather than the “debit” option when they come to pay.

And I can’t think of any good reason to charge a $19 inactivity fee to people who haven’t used their cards in 9 months.

The fact is that students are often very naive when it comes to money, and it’s easy to gouge them once or twice before they learn that banks are not necessarily on their side. If you can get your card accepted by a majority of freshmen every year, and then come up with all manner of weird fees to hit them with, that’s a great way of making money out of ignorance.

Meanwhile, all students should have a bank account: giving them a debit card instead only serves to maximize the number of unbanked students. So while I’m sure cards like this are attractive to colleges, it would be great if either the colleges or else the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started being a lot more critical of them. Prepaid cards only ever make sense if the alternative is being completely unbanked; that should not ever be the case for students.

*At Southern Oregon University, Higher One agreed to waive the 50-cent PIN-debit charge, but only if there was a simultaneous “swipe-and-sign” campaign. If the campaign is unsuccessful and students do the sensible thing by using PIN debit, then the university can be charged $2 per student for “PIN fee elimination”.

Update: Higher One’s Donald Smith responds:

Higher One was founded 10 years ago by three college students (undergraduates at the time) who were looking for streamlining the way financial aid refunds were distributed to students. Today we work with more than 675 campuses across the country, have a 97% client retention rating, and an A+ rating with the BBB.

The OneAccount is Higher One’s optional, no minimum balance, no monthly fee, FDIC-Insured checking account created by students for students. We do not offer a stored value card. We are very open with our fee schedule. We post it on every program website for all to access, explain each fee, discuss how to avoid each fee, and provide students with a web page that tells them how to use the account for free (which you’ve already found). Because of this, we believe that our customers pay less than half the amount in fees that the average bank checking account customer pays per year.

Two of the fees you referenced in your blog are the PIN fee and the Abandoned Account Fee. The PIN fee is easily avoided by choosing a signature based transaction at the checkout. The majority of students uses it in this manner and is in turn protected by MasterCard’s Zero Liability Policy against fraudulent charges (a safer way of purchasing than a PIN based transaction). We do not have an inactivity fee on our fee schedule – we don’t penalize students who do not use their accounts. We do have an Abandoned Account Fee of up to $19, for those who have abandoned their accounts, but this has been charged to less than 1% of all OneAccount holders in our company’s history because of our proactive outreach plan.

Higher One offers no instruments of credit. As a matter of fact, we’re generally in favor of initiatives restricting students’ access to credit cards and promoting financial literacy. This is why we offer a full range of financial literacy resources along with the services we provide.

I particularly dislike the implication, here, that PIN-based transactions are unsafe. They’re not; they’re just less lucrative, in terms of interchange fees, than signature-based transactions.

eric seiger

Verizon iPhone 4 | Adan <b>News</b>

Verizon iPhone 4 | Adan News | New iPhone Info Says: October 10th, 2010 at 10:03 pm. Verizon iPhone 4. It's coming soon…or is it? I remember back in March, right before the end of the first quarter the WSJ said that the Verizon ...

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'American Idol's Crystal Bowersox married musician Brian Walker on Sunday, October 10, 2010, in Chicago, and will celebrate their anniversary on 10/10/10 along with the other approximated 40000 lovebirds who said 'I Do'

eric seiger

eric seiger

eric seiger

Verizon iPhone 4 | Adan <b>News</b>

Verizon iPhone 4 | Adan News | New iPhone Info Says: October 10th, 2010 at 10:03 pm. Verizon iPhone 4. It's coming soon…or is it? I remember back in March, right before the end of the first quarter the WSJ said that the Verizon ...

Fox <b>News</b> - Fox Business | New Ad | Two Networks - Solve | Mediaite

Back in June, a Fox Business Network promo featured only Fox News stars, touting the new financial channel. Now there's a new marketing strategy out, in ads playing on News Corp. cable news networks but also across the dial, ...

&#39;American Idol&#39;s Crystal Bowersox Gets Married | Fancast <b>News</b>

'American Idol's Crystal Bowersox married musician Brian Walker on Sunday, October 10, 2010, in Chicago, and will celebrate their anniversary on 10/10/10 along with the other approximated 40000 lovebirds who said 'I Do'

eric seiger


some things need to be re-read..

Mark E Hoffer Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:04 am

QOTD:

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. —John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (13 December 1935)

Robespierre Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:11 am

@constantnormal Says:

September 23rd, 2010 at 10:36 am

“This is where we are heading, in our journey to reshape the US into the world’s largest banana republic.”

I think it is becoming more like a feudal system than a banana republic.

Arequipa01 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:14 am

The De Soto interview is interesting and embedded in it is an interesting tidbit:

“Fink: This is how the de Soto model works. Property ownership allows poor people to obtain credit, amass capital, and climb out of poverty. Legal reforms make all of that possible. Right now in most developing countries, a morass of laws and bureaucracy keeps the poor from being able to gain title to their property, register their businesses and secure loans.

But de Soto’s ideas have run up against some hard realities. Governments have tended to implement only some of the reforms he champions. And few Peruvian shanty dwellers have been able or willing to borrow against their homes. Most banks don’t extend credit to owners of straw huts and rickety wooden shacks. And taking out a loan is risky for the poor. The owners of the garment factory de Soto and I visited have taken on considerable debt.

De Soto: “About $114,000.”

Fink: They’re paying a high interest rate.

De Soto: “Their interest rates are 2% per month.”

Fink: And they’re worried about keeping up with the payments. Less than a year ago, the factory operated at full capacity. Now it’s at just a quarter of that. As we drive away from the factory, de Soto questions what the future holds for these entrepreneurs.

De Soto: “They may have gone in over their heads. We don’t know.”

The other side of that coin is indebtedness. “obtain credit, amass capital” It’s just that easy! why didn’t I think of that.

You see, while I am very much in favor of improving the titling of property in Peru*, but the assumption that there is a liquid market for properties in an area like Huaycán is unwarranted. There is not. So, you secure a loan with a bank and pledge your property in an illiquid market. Hmmm, would any of you all be interested in that?

* This is a fascinating reality to study and some bright United Statesian kid in CRE should be figuring out how his/her organization can participate in the CRE boom in Lima.

rktbrkr Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:19 am

Real systemic risk!

“We’re not just talking about isolated incidents of problems with foreclosures, we’re talking systemic,”

GMAC suspends foreclosure evictions and sales of seized property

By KIMBERLY MILLER

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Foreclosure evictions and homeowner lockouts have been halted by Ally Financial Inc.’s GMAC Mortgage in 23 states including Florida as the nation’s fifth-largest home loan servicer addresses legal challenges to its foreclosure procedures.

A two-page memo dated Sept. 17 and marked “urgent” told brokers to immediately stop evictions, cash-for-key transactions, lockouts and to suspend sales of properties already taken back by the bank in foreclosure.

The memo, first reported by Bloomberg news service, comes at the same time the Tampa-based Florida Default Law Group has been withdrawing legal affidavits in its GMAC foreclosure cases under “candor to the court” rules acknowledging previously submitted information may have been inaccurate.

St. Petersburg defense attorney Matt Weidner, who is handling a case in which a GMAC affidavit was withdrawn last week, called the freeze “staggering.”

“I suspect they are recognizing they have a really big problem,” Weidner said. “I think they are afraid the foreclosure judgments may be voidable.”

If that’s the case, Weidner said it won’t be just GMAC redoing their foreclosure procedures.

“We’re not just talking about isolated incidents of problems with foreclosures, we’re talking systemic,” he said.

rktbrkr Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:21 am

It sounds like these courts are malfunctioning and need to call a “time out”

ashpelham2 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:25 am

Look, I work at a fairly large regional bank in the Southern US. What happened with this guy started out as someone just blindly pushing buttons and paper, and then morphed into a complete failure of all possible safeguards to make sure something like this couldn’t happen. So, there is a lot of blame to go around, and yeah, this guy is probably owed some kind of restitution for the hassle and crap he’s been through. Should he, or any lawyer, be made wealthy because of it? No, but the courts failed to protect this guy in the original foreclosure process. Why should we expect the courts to get it right when he sues the hell out of B of A?

Banking has been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator at this level. All the brains are making huge bucks in the stuff that got us in the toilet to begin with.

Darkness Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:29 am

I didn’t get what the title company was doing in all this. I can see the courts processing the foreclosures out of order, there is a long tradition of courts barely glancing at foreclosure orders and really, no one expects them to do otherwise, but the title company really screwed up here royally. All of these parties are getting paid their cut to provide a double check on the process and are doing squat. Parasites, the lot of them.

WFTA Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 11:37 am

BR,

There you go encouraging those pesky plaintiffs’ attorneys again when I’ve been told for the last twenty years that’s why healthcare is unaffordable. Think what this will do for foreclosure inflation!

Matt SF Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 12:10 pm

One word: Pillory.

Sentence any and all of these corrupt morons to 1 year of mandatory public shame. Only way this nonsense is going to stop is if the anger of the masses is correctly harnessed and directed at those who are propagating the crimes. Letting them pay a fine and *not* admit wrongdoing will only perpetuate the cycle.

Oh, and the afflicted home owner(s) should be given the option of flinging rotten eggs and tomatoes if he or she chooses.

louis Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 12:36 pm

This just shows what you are dealing with and why none of the programs for housing are working.

jjay Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 12:40 pm

“Suck it up, Grodensky!’

All my love,

Charlie Munger

bergsten Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 12:43 pm

That’s it. I’m starting my own bank. It isn’t all that hard, you just have to fill out some state form or another.

Brendan Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 12:57 pm

I love the irony that we have comments on this blog by people who are screaming about how it’s just unacceptable that the banking industry isn’t doing its due diligence before foreclosing… and then making completely false statements because they haven’t done their own due diligence.

ACORN’s “flunkies” were acquitted of “cooperating with a prostitution scheme” as the videos were shown to be “severely edited” by investigators (for lack of a better resource I’ll use Wikipedia):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN_2009_undercover_videos_controversy

And also healthcare is not unaffordable due to litigation costs, as has been shown time and time again. Here’s a very recent study pegging the cost at 2.4% of total costs; see:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/200462.php

I don’t think you can reasonably say that is to blame for the high cost of healthcare.

Pot meet kettle! You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts!

contrabandista13 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:01 pm

Sounds to me like… “ALL BETS ARE OFF….”

I have a good friend that got even for all of you, with BoA to the tune of 3 million….

He legally scammed them for over 3 million…. He told me that it was like shooting fish in a barrel and they cooperated all the way to the gallows…. Two of their VPs got their asses canned for it….

Bravo to my friend Tim B…..

Best regards,

Econolicious

Brendan Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:01 pm

P.S. I recognize that the health-care comment may have been tongue-in-cheek, but it wasn’t really made very clear…

poppysmic Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:45 pm

That’s brilliant by the Bank. They made/ will make money on the deal. Have you ever had a bank error in YOUR favor? Of course not. All credit card fraud can be stopped in almost an instant but they make money on the float. The vendor eats the loss, you make payment on the error until it clears, then they pass on the cost to Ins. or consumer. It sucks for honest citizens, but it’s the bottom line that matters….What’s the line? ” Greed is God’?

Space_Cowboy_NW Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:45 pm

TX Capitial Punishment is to ____________ as FL Foreclosure Mills are to ______________

SOP in the Legal environment: ”Win some, lose some, bill ‘em early & often”

Only guilty people go to prison so remember:” Admit Nothing, Deny Everything, and promptly call your counsel.”

Your mileage may vary…..

APBERUSDISVET Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:50 pm

Where was the title company in this mess? Or were they the corrupt instigator?

WFTA Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 1:57 pm

Brendan, buddy. Lighten up. I’m on your side.

We need a sense of humor, cause I’m afeared it a hard rain gonna fall.

willid3 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 2:07 pm

and i thought many were big on property rights. oh i forgot, its property rights for corporations, TBTF and others. just not for the people

MinnItMan Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 2:53 pm

A title company should have closed the cash purchase. If the buyer (Grodensky) didn’t use one, his bad. Penny-wise, pound-foolishness.

It’s worth pointing out that cash purchasers usually mean prospective slum-lords, but I don’t know that here. Alsos, his credit should not be affected. The loan was in the name of the former owner.

Not excusing anything, but I suspect the facts would show some strange bedfellows in this story in a fuller reporting.

bergsten Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 2:58 pm

This box just popped up, asking if I wanted to participate in a TBP survey.

I like Barry, so I figured, “why not”?

The first question asked for my age. Fine. The second asked for (something along the lines of) my interests.

The first choice was “pet care.”

Sorry, but that’s when I bailed on the survey.

Is this legitimate or another ad that’s taken over the site?

formerlawyer Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 3:58 pm

In my former jurisdiction and others, fraudsters would often take out a mortgage using forged identity. The process involved looking for (preferably vacant) properties without mortgages which was easily done from public records.

From that, forged identity for the owner would be obtained and a mortgage placed on the land with the fraudsters seeing a lawyer to finalize the documents. The fraudsters would set up a bank account from which payments could be withdrawn and place just enough money (ie. 6 months mortgage payments) to fund the mortgage. Often they would then move the address for service of record to a fictional address so that notification of the true owner would be forestalled. Thereafter, the mortgage proceeds would be laundered – usually by way of casinos on Indian lands or other mechanisms.

While personal service would be preferred, substitutional service on the lands or in a newspaper was commonly allowed in foreclosures. Voila – foreclosure once the money ran out.

While that is not the case here from my understanding this is not unknown.

willid3 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 4:05 pm

and foreclosure is controlled by the states. Fed have nothing to do with it (short of bankruptcy being involved).

Casual Onlooker Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 5:10 pm

I find the arguments that mistakes like BofA are just simple oversight, and one off errors that did little harm. From a lot of the various stories out there, from banks that “lose paperwork” to people getting lost in voice mail hell just trying to find a real person, much less a person a person that is not reading a script off his computer, speaks volumes as to the increasing chaos in the system.

To add to GMAC story, NPR yesterday aired a segment on this, and some of the details are rather troubling. http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=130052495

From the story…

————

Chris Immel is an attorney at Ice Legal, a foreclosure defense firm in West Palm Beach, Florida. He conducted a deposition with a GMAC employee named Jeffrey Stephan. Immel says his job was to sign foreclosure documents.

Mr. CHRISTOPHER IMMEL (Attorney, Ice Legal): We took his deposition. And in taking it, he pretty much admitted to signing, you know, he said approximately 10,000 documents a month.

KEITH: Attorneys like Immel have taken to calling these employees at loan servicing firms robo-signers.

———

I mean really, 10,000 documents a month by a single person… where is the due diligence in that? How does this not rise to the level of a endemic problem that needs addressing? That’s 62.5 documents signed an hour, or one a minute.

Brady Dennis Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 5:47 pm

Robo-signer’ played quiet role in huge number of foreclosures

The robo-signer lives on a quiet street in this small town an hour’s drive northwest of Philadelphia.

His modest two-story house, for which he paid $118,000, sits on a corner lot just down the street from the local Moose Lodge and an all-night diner. A weathered Chrysler Concorde is parked in the driveway, and a Toyota Camry sits by the curb.

Many large mortgage lenders have come to rely on a relative handful of so-called robo-signers such as Jeffrey Stephan, 41, to attest to the accuracy of thousands of home foreclosure documents across the country. These workers are not the Wall Street masterminds who created ever more complex mortgage-backed securities and fueled the subprime mortgage boom, but rather “affidavit slaves” with modest incomes and mountainous workloads.

Their actions are leading lawyers representing foreclosed homeowners to claim that lenders have no legal standing if the filings weren’t reviewed and verified, and to argue that the cases should be thrown out.

Herb2 Says:



September 23rd, 2010 at 7:42 pm

In the Philippines when Marcos declared martial law, I noticed that much more attention and money flowed into elections of judges than into elections of senators, which was contrary to my experience in the US. Subsequently I learned that judges decided which phony paperwork was authentic when title to a property was contested.

The particulars are different, but we drift in a similar direction.

Home buying on a Saturday « Tim Hedden's Blog Says:



September 25th, 2010 at 7:01 pm

other day I read a fairly enthusiastic Barry Ritholtz post entitled Man without Mortgage Loses Home in Foreclosure. Basically, the Florida court system is so in the groove of foreclosing on properties, they are

doloresflynn Says:



September 26th, 2010 at 3:45 pm

Please set a standard here !

As soon as you uthrow out the f-bomb, everyone thinks it is their cue to trash the place.

Morality belongs to the financial sector as well as personal, and if you are educated, you can get your point across very well without vulgar puctuations.

Florida’s Foreclosures Nightmare | The Big Picture Says:



September 29th, 2010 at 2:53 pm

Man without Mortgage Loses Home in Foreclosure (September 23rd,

BofA’s unfunny foreclosure tricks | Anne-Marie Wurzel, P.A., Real Estate Agent - Winter Springs, FL Real Estate Office Says:



September 30th, 2010 at 11:05 am

seems. Barry Ritholtz says at his blog that the only way the banks will ever learn is if they lose big judgments in court – a notion that seems to be borne out by another aspect of the Schroit

stopGOVTwaste Says:



October 2nd, 2010 at 1:16 am

So if they come once with fake documents, do they have free reign to come back and try again with NEW fake docs? The mortgage MUST remain together with the note but MERS prevents that from happening. Bifurcation =’s off book securities transactions.

What they don’t want to tell you is that the insurance taken out on the loan pool at 30x value of pool (conservatively) has paid off – EXTINGUISHED – the loans in the underlying pool, many times over (AIG, AMBAC, MGIC, TARP, ETC). But wait a second, weren’t these the same loans that were supposed to be “recorded” in public land records per the terms of the Pooling & Servicing Agreement (PSA) and the Mortgage “contract” (see section 20 of the standard Fannie/Freddie instrument).

So if the chain of custody was never recorded, then the trusts set up to hold the loan pools actually held “nothing but air” – if they even existed at all.

You can’t collect on a debt that has been paid off, that is fraud. Plus, the controlling aspects of the PSA void the sale of the asset under FAS 140, in addition the REMIC will lose it’s tax deferred status under IRS Code. You cannot commit securities fraud, tax fraud, violate a plethora of federal and state lending and consumers laws and get away with it scott free… can you? The crime is mortgage backed securities and the crime scene is our public land records.

Enjoy the video (below) and have a great weekend!

Slowing the Runaway Foreclosure Train | The Big Picture Says:



October 4th, 2010 at 7:26 am

we have seen, homeowners without mortgages have lost their home to foreclosure. That this legal impossibility actually occurred  reveals the

Boston Real Estate Blog : Blog Archive : Slowing down the foreclosure assembly line Says:



October 4th, 2010 at 9:53 am

we have seen, homeowners without mortgages have lost their home to foreclosure. That this legal impossibility actually occurred  reveals the

Are WSJ OpEd Writers Clueless or Liars? | The Big Picture Says:



October 11th, 2010 at 11:10 am

has been widely circulated and discussed in the media, Man’s home sold out from under him in foreclosure mistake. The

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This was probably inevitable: the minute that Dodd-Frank cracked down on the fees charged by credit cards aimed at students, some other bright financial innovation would crop up. This time, a debit card aimed at students. Which carries lots of fees. Ylan Mui reports that a company called Higher One has started signing up colleges around the country, taking on the burden of providing cash to students. In return, it gets lots of fees:

Students say several of the fees associated with Higher One’s card are particularly irksome, including the $19 inactivity fee, a 50-cent charge for using a PIN to make a purchase rather than a signature, and a $2.50 fee for using other banks’ ATMs…

Higher One said that only 1 percent of customers have been charged an inactivity fee and that more than half are charged the 50-cent fee only once. All fees are listed on Higher One’s Web site, along with tips on avoiding them.

“We have a big effort with educating students on how to use the account,” Smith said. “We’re very passionate about financial literacy.”

If the fees are listed on Higher One’s website, they’re not exactly prominent. I did find this page, eventually, via this blog entry, but it just says that “when you swipe & sign, you won’t be charged the PIN-based transaction fee”. I haven’t been able to find a page showing a 50-cent transaction fee anywhere*, although I did manage to find this page, showing a $25 fee for domestic wire transfers and a $50 fee for international wire transfers. “Higher One offers less costly alternatives for transferring funds”, it says, without giving any indication what they might be; I suspect that what they’re talking about is transfers to or from people who have already registered somehow with Higher One.

It should go without saying that any firm which is “very passionate about financial literacy” would encourage, rather than penalize, simple, cheap and safe PIN-debit transactions. It would not give students a debit card and then tell them that if they want to avoid fees they should select the “credit” option rather than the “debit” option when they come to pay.

And I can’t think of any good reason to charge a $19 inactivity fee to people who haven’t used their cards in 9 months.

The fact is that students are often very naive when it comes to money, and it’s easy to gouge them once or twice before they learn that banks are not necessarily on their side. If you can get your card accepted by a majority of freshmen every year, and then come up with all manner of weird fees to hit them with, that’s a great way of making money out of ignorance.

Meanwhile, all students should have a bank account: giving them a debit card instead only serves to maximize the number of unbanked students. So while I’m sure cards like this are attractive to colleges, it would be great if either the colleges or else the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started being a lot more critical of them. Prepaid cards only ever make sense if the alternative is being completely unbanked; that should not ever be the case for students.

*At Southern Oregon University, Higher One agreed to waive the 50-cent PIN-debit charge, but only if there was a simultaneous “swipe-and-sign” campaign. If the campaign is unsuccessful and students do the sensible thing by using PIN debit, then the university can be charged $2 per student for “PIN fee elimination”.

Update: Higher One’s Donald Smith responds:

Higher One was founded 10 years ago by three college students (undergraduates at the time) who were looking for streamlining the way financial aid refunds were distributed to students. Today we work with more than 675 campuses across the country, have a 97% client retention rating, and an A+ rating with the BBB.

The OneAccount is Higher One’s optional, no minimum balance, no monthly fee, FDIC-Insured checking account created by students for students. We do not offer a stored value card. We are very open with our fee schedule. We post it on every program website for all to access, explain each fee, discuss how to avoid each fee, and provide students with a web page that tells them how to use the account for free (which you’ve already found). Because of this, we believe that our customers pay less than half the amount in fees that the average bank checking account customer pays per year.

Two of the fees you referenced in your blog are the PIN fee and the Abandoned Account Fee. The PIN fee is easily avoided by choosing a signature based transaction at the checkout. The majority of students uses it in this manner and is in turn protected by MasterCard’s Zero Liability Policy against fraudulent charges (a safer way of purchasing than a PIN based transaction). We do not have an inactivity fee on our fee schedule – we don’t penalize students who do not use their accounts. We do have an Abandoned Account Fee of up to $19, for those who have abandoned their accounts, but this has been charged to less than 1% of all OneAccount holders in our company’s history because of our proactive outreach plan.

Higher One offers no instruments of credit. As a matter of fact, we’re generally in favor of initiatives restricting students’ access to credit cards and promoting financial literacy. This is why we offer a full range of financial literacy resources along with the services we provide.

I particularly dislike the implication, here, that PIN-based transactions are unsafe. They’re not; they’re just less lucrative, in terms of interchange fees, than signature-based transactions.

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eric seiger

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Verizon iPhone 4 | Adan News | New iPhone Info Says: October 10th, 2010 at 10:03 pm. Verizon iPhone 4. It's coming soon…or is it? I remember back in March, right before the end of the first quarter the WSJ said that the Verizon ...

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&#39;American Idol&#39;s Crystal Bowersox Gets Married | Fancast <b>News</b>

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Back in June, a Fox Business Network promo featured only Fox News stars, touting the new financial channel. Now there's a new marketing strategy out, in ads playing on News Corp. cable news networks but also across the dial, ...

&#39;American Idol&#39;s Crystal Bowersox Gets Married | Fancast <b>News</b>

'American Idol's Crystal Bowersox married musician Brian Walker on Sunday, October 10, 2010, in Chicago, and will celebrate their anniversary on 10/10/10 along with the other approximated 40000 lovebirds who said 'I Do'

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Verizon iPhone 4 | Adan <b>News</b>

Verizon iPhone 4 | Adan News | New iPhone Info Says: October 10th, 2010 at 10:03 pm. Verizon iPhone 4. It's coming soon…or is it? I remember back in March, right before the end of the first quarter the WSJ said that the Verizon ...

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Back in June, a Fox Business Network promo featured only Fox News stars, touting the new financial channel. Now there's a new marketing strategy out, in ads playing on News Corp. cable news networks but also across the dial, ...

&#39;American Idol&#39;s Crystal Bowersox Gets Married | Fancast <b>News</b>

'American Idol's Crystal Bowersox married musician Brian Walker on Sunday, October 10, 2010, in Chicago, and will celebrate their anniversary on 10/10/10 along with the other approximated 40000 lovebirds who said 'I Do'

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Verizon iPhone 4 | Adan <b>News</b>

Verizon iPhone 4 | Adan News | New iPhone Info Says: October 10th, 2010 at 10:03 pm. Verizon iPhone 4. It's coming soon…or is it? I remember back in March, right before the end of the first quarter the WSJ said that the Verizon ...

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Back in June, a Fox Business Network promo featured only Fox News stars, touting the new financial channel. Now there's a new marketing strategy out, in ads playing on News Corp. cable news networks but also across the dial, ...

&#39;American Idol&#39;s Crystal Bowersox Gets Married | Fancast <b>News</b>

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Verizon iPhone 4 | Adan <b>News</b>

Verizon iPhone 4 | Adan News | New iPhone Info Says: October 10th, 2010 at 10:03 pm. Verizon iPhone 4. It's coming soon…or is it? I remember back in March, right before the end of the first quarter the WSJ said that the Verizon ...

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&#39;American Idol&#39;s Crystal Bowersox Gets Married | Fancast <b>News</b>

'American Idol's Crystal Bowersox married musician Brian Walker on Sunday, October 10, 2010, in Chicago, and will celebrate their anniversary on 10/10/10 along with the other approximated 40000 lovebirds who said 'I Do'

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Many of us are looking for alternatives to making money in the traditional sense, in the past to make money one would typically have to leave the comforts of home in search of employment. Whether it be traditional at a employee based job or as an independent worker offering services to others. The future has brought higher gas prices, lower wages and higher cost of daycare, which in turn has caused many to find other alternatives. The good news is that over the last few years more and more resources are coming forth to help us achieve the goal of never leaving home. For years now we have began shopping, banking and now ever working from home. Today Ill share two of my favorite sites to make money, hopefully they will be a help to you as well.

www.race4offers.com is a paid to click and complete site, you will find many of these when you search on the internet, but I recommend searching for others who have tried and used these sites and actually been paid. As with everything there is always one or two bad seed that does not follow the rules. Race for offers is a great site; I have been a member for over a year now and receive my payment on time every month with no worries. There are two different aspects to this site, one is a paid trial section and the other is a free offer section. On the paid trial section you might for example sign up for a 1 month trail of an Internet feature using a credit card. You have the option to cancel anytime before the one month trial is over to not be charged, however if you forget be ware they will charge you. When you sign up for these offers race for offers website gives you a reward, it can range from pennies to dollars. Just make sure you keep a list of what you sign up for and the cancellation dates if you choose to cancel. The other section is the free trial section, while the rewards here are considerably smaller there is no credit card or cancellation required. These offers might be as simple as entering your email address or doing a simple survey. The site pays monthly by pay pal account, you wont get rich but it is an easy way to make a little extra money with out leaving home.

www.sharedreviews.com is a site where you can write and get paid for your product reviews. Do you love your new camera, or perhaps you hate the new deodorant you bought recently and want to tell everyone about it? Shared Reviews gives you that chance and best of all pays you to do it. They pay ten dollars for every 5 reviews and to be honest each review only takes just a few moments to write, so they pay is great in that respect. They pay weekly by pay pal when you have earned at least 10 dollars. So next time you find that great new product, simply type it up and make some money.


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Verizon iPhone 4 | Adan <b>News</b>

Verizon iPhone 4 | Adan News | New iPhone Info Says: October 10th, 2010 at 10:03 pm. Verizon iPhone 4. It's coming soon…or is it? I remember back in March, right before the end of the first quarter the WSJ said that the Verizon ...

Fox <b>News</b> - Fox Business | New Ad | Two Networks - Solve | Mediaite

Back in June, a Fox Business Network promo featured only Fox News stars, touting the new financial channel. Now there's a new marketing strategy out, in ads playing on News Corp. cable news networks but also across the dial, ...

&#39;American Idol&#39;s Crystal Bowersox Gets Married | Fancast <b>News</b>

'American Idol's Crystal Bowersox married musician Brian Walker on Sunday, October 10, 2010, in Chicago, and will celebrate their anniversary on 10/10/10 along with the other approximated 40000 lovebirds who said 'I Do'

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Verizon iPhone 4 | Adan <b>News</b>

Verizon iPhone 4 | Adan News | New iPhone Info Says: October 10th, 2010 at 10:03 pm. Verizon iPhone 4. It's coming soon…or is it? I remember back in March, right before the end of the first quarter the WSJ said that the Verizon ...

Fox <b>News</b> - Fox Business | New Ad | Two Networks - Solve | Mediaite

Back in June, a Fox Business Network promo featured only Fox News stars, touting the new financial channel. Now there's a new marketing strategy out, in ads playing on News Corp. cable news networks but also across the dial, ...

&#39;American Idol&#39;s Crystal Bowersox Gets Married | Fancast <b>News</b>

'American Idol's Crystal Bowersox married musician Brian Walker on Sunday, October 10, 2010, in Chicago, and will celebrate their anniversary on 10/10/10 along with the other approximated 40000 lovebirds who said 'I Do'

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