Modification Crisis?

 I am fascinated by Chinese culture. Their philosophy, customs, familial relationships, and especially the language. And even more specifically, the written language. You see, the Chinese have no alphabet. Rather than putting together a series of letters to create a word, and then stringing together several words to make a sentence, etc., their language consists of over 40,000 symbols, each of which have their own meanings, and can be combined with other symbols to mean something completely different, and yet share a relationship with the original symbols. I give this brief language culture lesson to illustrate this: The Chinese symbol for ‘Crisis’, is in actuality a combination of two other symbols. That of ‘danger’, and ‘opportunity’.

The situation we currently find ourselves in is very often called a crisis. By the media, the politicians, the banks, CEOs, and those of us who actually work for a living. What does that mean? It means we are in financial ‘danger’, and yet we have an ‘opportunity’ to not only rescue ourselves, but to actually improve our overall circumstances. How, you ask? Read on!

In the history of the world, we have never faced a financial burden of the scope and breadth that we now face. Lenders of old could foreclose on a loan at any given time, without fear of losing anything more than what amounts to pocket change. Today, however, the sheer volume of what are being called ‘toxic’ loans puts the banks in a brand-new place. They simply cannot afford to foreclose on everyone. The losses would be insurmountable.

What this means to the average homeowner, who now faces the burden of making unaffordable payments on a property that has lost value, in a market where it’s almost cheaper to rent right now, is that we now have a voice. And it’s a voice that the banks and Mortgage companies cannot afford to ignore, so they really want to talk to us. We have an opportunity as homeowners to take advantage of the situation, and lower our payments, our interest rates, and in some cases, even the principal balances on our loans. All we have to do is use our voices.

The Chinese philosopher, Confucious is credited with the phrase “A man who lives in a glass house should not throw stones.” Don’t worry America, this house isn’t glass. Feel free to chunk a rock or two.