Monday, June 30, 2008
check advance
My parents have been trouble lately dealing with the housing crisis. They are among two groups of people that have had a hard time dealing with the problems of our economy lately. The are both retired people and so for the past five years or so they have not been working. Rightly so as they are not in the best of health conditions at this point in their lives. So in this respect they are not the best people to have to be dealing with quick economic changes that directly affect them. When they retired my father got a big check for his pension from the company he worked for for the last thirty-five years. When they got this initial supplement of money they decided that they were going to retire to a new home. They had a really amazing home built in the woods not to far from where our old home had been. Unfortunately for them they were sort of suckered in to one of these sub-prime mortgages because they were paying for the house mostly with the retirement funds given to them by the company.
Fast forward to a year ago and the situation had changed dramatically. There is an experiment where if you slowly heat up a frog in water from very cold to boiling that it will just stay until it dies. This what seemed to be the case with my parents' mortgage payments. They slowly crept from a reasonable amount up to a level so high that they couldn't afford to pay anymore. At first they began by getting a cash advance every month until my father could get his social security check and pay it off. Then he was asking for a check advance to be able to make the rest of the bills on time. This was only a short term solution to a long term problem, but they could not see any other way to survive what was going on. About four months ago they had to sell the house and the took a lot of their debt with them. Now my father does work a part-time job on a cleaning crew for banks in the area and still has to take a monthly payday advance for the mortgage he doesn't own. This whole thing is just insanity to me.
Mike @ 7:56 PM