I read this last night and was about to fire something off but I'd been pretty prolific yesterday, but I wanted to get a few facts together and gin and research are not good bedfellows.
Baseball star Canseco loses home to foreclosure
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Former U.S. baseball star Jose Canseco said on Thursday he had lost his California mansion to foreclosure -- one of the first celebrities to publicly admit being a statistic in the U.S. housing crisis.
Canseco, 43, one of the most flamboyant U.S. baseball players until his retirement from the major leagues in 2001, told the celebrity TV show "Inside Edition" that it did not make financial sense to keep his 7,300 square-foot (678.2 sq-metro) home in the Los Angeles suburb of Encino.
"Inside Edition" said it had foreclosure documents showing Canseco owed a bank more than $2.5 million on the house.
"I've been out of the game for about eight or nine years and obviously this issue with the foreclosure on my home," he told "Inside Edition."
"I do have a judgment on my home and it to me is very strange because it didn't make financial sense for me to keep paying a mortgage on a home that was basically owned by someone else," he
said.
Canseco said the foreclosure was not a difficult issue emotionally. But he sympathized with the millions of other Americans who have already lost, or face losing their homes, because of soaring interest rates on sub-prime loans.
"I decided to just let it go, but in most cases and most families, they have nowhere else to go," he said.
It was not clear from the "Inside Edition" report where Canseco was now living.
U.S. home foreclosure filings jumped 23 percent in the first quarter of 2008 from the prior quarter and more than doubled from a year earlier, real estate data firm RealtyTrac reported this
week.
My first impression was "Is Jose Canseco is the best they can do to show how even the rich and famous are losing their homes?"
But then I read the piece and he admits he had a judgement against the house and he decided he would stop paying for a house that is not his, so he chose to stop paying, naturally the bank repossessed. The article makes you believe he lost his home like everyone else who paid too much for their houses, put no money down and took a three year interest only balloon loan; but the fact is he stopped paying his bills voluntarily, not out of necessity.
But what piqued my interest was when he stated he stated that he sympathized with the millions that faced, or are facing, losing their homes. The article then prints some data from RealtyTrac giving percentages of foreclosures and their increases from last quarter and last year.
Now when people go to the extreme of quoting percentages but give the total as "millions" that sets off the BS detector. So a mere 1.9 seconds after typing "2006 US foreclosures" into the search engine I was rewarded with the true data that there were 268,532 homes repossessed in 2006, in 2007 the number was approximately 405,000, while the number of foreclosures was approximately 1.3 million.
You see, foreclosure is the first step mortgage holders take to dispossess people of their houses, repossession is the second. Both require court judgements. The defendant can plead their case at both, and in 66% of the cases the bank and owner come to terms or the bank allows the defendant time to sell the house and pay off the mortgage.
So my point here, besides Canseco is a narcissistic tool, is that foreclosure doesn't mean dispossession. And percentages are only effective when used with raw data, otherwise they are just propaganda tools.
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