Friday, August 22, 2008

Me Too

Miss Anonymous is lamenting that she won't qualify for some sort of sweet bailout deal the FDIC because she isn't an idiot with bad credit. Ditto. When we were looking at houses our loan officer told us I had one of the best credit ratings he'd ever seen. Then he looked at Amy's. It is even better. Did we qualify for an amazing rate? Not really. We wound up with a 6+% 30 year fixed.

As an outsider, it looks like the mortgage companies are hoping that buy giving high risk borrowers low rates in hopes that they won't default and hedging their bets with mediocre rates for low risk consumers. This doesn't seem like a good idea to me. High risk borrowers aren't just high risk because they don't have any money, they're also high risk because they don't know how to manage the money they have. More importantly, a small startup could steal the low risk borrowers out from under them by simply offering them the rates they deserve, not the rates they're currently getting.

But then again I'm an engineer not some sort of actuary so what do I know?

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