According to Black Knight Financial Services (who are completely ready to bite your legs off and/or claim that you only dealt them a flesh-wound if you quarrel with them) about 30% of the loans written in 2013 went to borrowers with a FICO score below 720. That's pretty indicative of the lending standards not loosening as much as they should. And given the slowdown in refinance activity, that's not very cool of banks. Like 'they just bogarted the doobie and told us to "turn it down" again' level of uncoolness. Totally cramping my style and harshing my buzz.
That said, I'm noticing a lot of the old-timey loan programs creeping out from underneath the rocks which they've hid under for so many years. Foreign Nationals? Yup, we can finance them again. Scores down to 580? You betcha. Stated income??? The god-forsaken pariah of past wrong-doings??? Sadly, yes. Yes I can completely BS income (excuse me, state and not verify the income you are definitely making wink wink) and get an insured loan written. Aaaaaaaamerica. It's like someone watched The Wolf of Wall Street but stopped watching before everything went bad and said "let's do exactly that!!!!"
Tax Day is upon us, and with it I bring good tidings! Due to a minor little eency-weency change to the Farm Bill, the IRS is now able to bare its talons and money-rape you for debts that they just couldn't quite collect from your parents. Because just because death and taxes are the only two things in this world that are guaranteed, nobody told you which order they would come in.
The Malaysian flight 370 has…
I can't. I just friggin' can't. I don't care. Despite CNN's finest efforts, I just don't give a rat's ass. I guess I'm the only person who can admit it, but I do not in any way, shape or form care. It was 239 people, mostly Chinese. That many people choked to death on Big Macs this week. Do you see 'round the clock coverage of Big Mac chokings? Nope.
And not to be callous, but doesn't China have an over-population issue anyway? But no, that's a mean thing to say. Pumping so much pollution into the immediate atmosphere that it reaches California and letting cancer do the dirty work is a WAY more humane way to deal with it. I suppose it's a step up from dumping unwanted daughters into a stream. But not a big one.
College basketball happened. Gators didn't win. But they did make Final Four. Which I suppose is enough to distract us from the withered husk of a football team that Tebow left behind.
With 2016's elections starting to peek over the horizon, Jeb Bush made the surprisingly warm comment that he viewed illegal immigration as an act of love, citing those Mexicans that saw America as the only opportunity to provide for their families. He was promptly cast into the flaming bottomless pit of untold horrors that John Boehner keeps in his basement. Because immigration is baaad, mmkay? Real baaad.
Speaking of elections, the recent lackluster jobs report has set the stage for a bloodbath at Congress' mid-term elections. The two months prior had been effectively discounted due to the lagging effects of the "polar vortex" which evidently sucked for non-Floridians. But this last one couldn't look to Jack Frost as a scapegoat leaving Democratic lawmakers in a position of weakness.
The Affordable Care Act (or Barack Hussein Obama's devil child, depending on what circle you hail from) has officially closed the open enrollment period at the exchanges, tallying 7.1 million folks who acquired insurance via the exchanges despite massive website issues. I look forward to watching the newly insured unwashed masses take up urban base-jumping, games of 'chicken' in bulldozers and heroin simply because they can do so knowing all of us logical people will subsidize their hospital bills.
Because that is definitely going to happen.
On the subject of things that cost smart people money, the US deficit is slowly but surely decreasing through a cooperative effort of reduced stimulus, moderate job growth and a consistent (albeit slow) economic recovery. The worry is that if present laws are not amended then the drag created by increasing social security and medicare payments will reverse this trend and put us on the bullet train to national bankruptcy. Which leads me to suggest enacting Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" only instead of babies we use the elderly! Over 70? Into the wood-chipper you go. BOOM. Problem solved. And it concurrently drives down meat prices.
As if our armed forces didn't have big enough muscles, our Navy has recently introduced rail guns and lasers on its latest stealth warship which shows up on radar as a fishing vessel. A fishing vessel that can laser beam a plane straight out of the sky for less than the cost of a bottle of water AND can fire a projectile at a target 125 miles away at 7.5 times the speed of sound using only magnets AND I just got a huge freedom boner.
King Digital, the maker of popular smartphone game Candy Crush, recently went public with one of the most impressively bad IPOs in recent history, proving that you should STOP SENDING ME INVITES TO YOUR DUMB GAMES. Seriously.
If you haven't yet heard, all your passwords and account information have probably been compromised sometime over the past two years. Evidently there's this bug scampering around the internet called Heartbleed and it's pretty serious. Essentially compromised the whole damn internet over the past two years. I would be lying if I said I had even the slightest clue as to how it works, but it basically de-crypts al the stuff you do online that really should be encrypted. And that's bad.
So change your passwords. And while you're at it, tell that person you know who is buying a home that this great guy Greg is super-awesome at helping with mortgages. The two actions seem unrelated, I know. But do them both anyways. Don't over-think it.
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