Rachael Dollar, a Certified Mortgage Banker and lawyer, blogs about mortgage fraud at MortgageFraudBlog. There are currently a whole lot of people getting indicted and going to prison, with many more, just as guilty, who aren’t. This is grim stuff. Elderly owners getting fleeced and losing their homes, billion dollar scams, retirement plans destroyed - all because greedy, amoral scumbags thought they could exploit the system and because we have a corrupt system that too often allows and condones such predatory behavior.

The latest scam, foreclosure rescue scams.

Here is how the scam works. The homebuyer gets behind on mortgage payments. The predatory lender offers a “loan to get caught up” on the delinquent mortgage payments. In exchange for the rescue, the homeowner signs over the title to the predator, who promises that the homebuyer may remain in the home while paying rent. The predator then sells the house to someone else, and the original homeowner gets an eviction notice.

Yet only about a dozen states have laws against this kind of exploitation. This is capitalism at its sickest, allowing the theft of homes from the poor and unwary to exploiters and the wealthy while the law sits back idly and lets it happen.

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We arrived in Connecticut Friday on the red eye at 6 am (ugh), got the rental car, loaded our large pile of luggage and three cats, dropped two cats off at a vet to be boarded, then went to my sister’s house with Peggy Sue (Sue’s 17-year-old cat) where we promptly slept for 4 hours. We’ll be here for a few days until escrow closes on our new home.

I’m looking out the back window at snow-covered woods now, it’s really quite beautiful. Plus there’s no police helicopters or plane noise (our previous home in Van Nuys was on the approach path to Burbank airport.)

In many ways, Los Angeles was very good to us. The huge increase in home prices the past several years is allowing us to buy our home in Connecticut with just a little baby mortgage. The more you have, the more you make is a truism of capitalism. Yet many friends in LA still rent because they can’t afford to buy. The average rent for a 1 bdr apartment there is now at least $1200 a month and more like $1600 on the Westside. Yikes.

More than anything, it was the traffic that was a primary reason we moved. When you tell people here that Sue’s recent 17 mile commute to a client in LA took 90 minutes each way you often get a blank stare. Commute times like that just don’t compute here, they are just too insane. Too many in LA endure these long commutes and high rental prices when it seems to me that a government and society that genuinely cared about its populace would make affordable housing and mass transit be top priorities. priorities. Instead, a tiny number of rich get much richer while most everyone else struggles to get by. Is this a sustainable way of life? No.

Looking out that back window again, I’m thinking maybe a deer will be by soon, foraging for food in the woods. Or maybe that mom bear and her cubs will appear and raid the bird feeder for food like they’ve done before. Such is life in the semi-country, far from the maddening freeways.

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