How stupid and unthinking would you have to be to take it knowing full well that there is no way in hell you can afford the payments??
I can explain that, by the way.
Did I mention the Pick-A-Payment loan earlier?
The way a Pick-A-Payment loan worked was like this. You had four choices of payment each month. One payment was really, really low. Almost anyone could afford it.
The second payment was a little higher. The third payment higher still. The fourth payment was the highest.
Guess which payment 80 percent of all Pick-A-Payment customers paid every month?
That's right. The lowest payment.
When I saw a Wachovia internal memo a few years ago about their wildly popular Pick-A-Payment program and their plans to ramp it up and put it on steroids, that is the exact moment I discovered our financial planet was well and truly fucked.
What was not being carefully explaind to the borrowers was that the lowest payment was a negative amortization payment.
I will pause now while some readers google "negative amortization".
(
cue elevator music)
Okay. Understand?
If a borrower was making the lowest payment, they were not even covering the amount of interest owed on their loan every month.
Let's say you borrowed $250,000 at 5 percent API.
The lowest payment in a Pick-A-Payment loan might be, ohhh, let's say $512.23 a month.
The second lowest payment would be $638.64.
The third level payment would be $1,654.55
The fourth level payment would be $2,289.48
You can understand why 80 percent of the borrowers would make that $512.23 payment, yes?
All right. The first payment doesn't even cover the interest. The second payment is an interest-only payment. It does not pay down any principal. The third payment would pay off the loan in 30 years. The highest payment would pay off the loan in 15 years.
So at a minimum, just to avoid falling behind, you should be at least making the second highest payment of $638.64.
But if you make the $512.23 payment (which 80 percent did) then you are short $126.41 every month.
And that $126.41 gets added to your
principal every month.
At the end of the variable period of your loan, which can be three to five years, you have accumulated from 10 to 25 percent more debt.
Instead of $250,000 you now owe $275,000, best case scenario. And your monthly payment now resets to $1,788.76.
So there you were, paying $512 dollars a month, happy as a lark in your new home. Now you have to cough up $1788 a month.
Good luck with that!