My recently refinanced home loan is unfortunately with Bank of America

I recently went through another refinance to get a lower rate on my loan to 4.75% from 5.625% to save $200/month. I went through my loan broker and was able to not have to fill out 100 forms with mundane details they verify later, which for me begs the question why don’t they just look it up to begin with as I’m sure they get deals from the right places. Anyway, I guess that’d be a GOOD bank that would just take some info from you instead of asking how much you make, the address of where you work, how many pets you have, what your favorite place to eat is, what color is your hair, and other useful information. Because there are no GOOD banks I go through a loan broker who fills out most of these forms for me and applies, or whatever it is that she does, to get me a loan. In any event I’m now with Bank of America Home Loans, which isn’t exactly the good bank I’d like to support.

2011
02/14
CATEGORY
General
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NY Times Opinion Piece on the State of American Democracy

Having been reading tons of articles over the past year on politics and corporations in America and seeing all the money that was thrown around in the elections I reached the same conclusion as this op-ed: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/opinion/12herbert.html?_r=2&ref=opinion. That basically American politics is owned by the corporations who are sitting on a ton of money and bitching about high taxes. All the while making sure all profits go to the top and all risk goes to the bottom. We saw that with the wallstreet bailouts. They hardly knew what a CDO was and bragged that they did and didn’t have to explain it to the little guy because it was too confusing. The rating agencies basically rubber-stamped these investment vehicles when all one had to do was look into them and see the credit history of the people the loans were being made to was going downhill at an alarming rate. Then the government has to step in and bail them out with no strings attached and zero changes to the way the system is setup. The EPA just authorized the use of GMOs without proper investigations into long-term effects and basically giving the finger to small organic farmers who have to worry about the GMO seeds being spread to their fields and destroying the organic part of their crop. The EPA head is a former employee of Monsanto, the big large GMO Corn maker who just got approved to sell Organic Alfalfa. And you have the Republicans saying we need to cut this and that benefit to the people and the democrats going along with it because they have no spines. And cutting this and that regulation because it’s too difficult to keep up with all these laws and such that protect our air and water so instead of making $100 billion the company only makes $10 billion but allows us healthy air to breath and clean water to drink. And for some reason people still vote these loonies into office. It’s so depressing. I should take some drugs to help with that from the pharmaceutical companies who charge $100 a bottle of pills to Americans that they charge $0.50 some other company as a generic because the healthcare bill in America was worked out behind closed doors with these lobbyists. Hopefully we can get our democracy back and hopefully we can pass some amendment to the constitution to stop corporate money from invading politics and prosecute people who make these backroom deals for quick financial gains for the downgrade of society.

That became a bit of a rant, so be warned. But basically, we need to get out democracy back to help the people not the corporations.

2011
02/13
CATEGORY
Politics
Rants
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Looking forward to Cyanogenmod 7 on my Droid

A couple of weeks ago I had found a nice beta of CM7 for the droid that worked surprisingly well for being a pre-beta. The only gripes I had with it was that data would be lost after a phone call, it restarted randomly a few times, and the video camera didn’t work. Besides that it was really quick on the year old Droid. The theme itself is worth it. In any event I’m back to CM 6.2 for the time being. A couple of newer builds have come out and I can’t wait to try those.

2011
01/21
CATEGORY
General
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Movie companies just don’t get it.

Netflix is awesome. Watching instant movies at home is great and the price is perfect. Every movie should be on the service and it should work in every country. But it’s not. For some reason it doesn’t work in Europe, so it’s likely that market just pirates movies. It doesn’t have everything so you come across a movie that looks good to watch and have to wait for DVD by mail. Okay, I can see there are some restrictions and its not a perfect world. To fill in the gap you can use Amazon’s Video on Demand service, which is awesome. The price point is all out of whack though. Just looking at a preorder for Wall Street 2 through a virtual service, 14.99. That’s right, 15 bucks for a movie to own and watch online. That’s the same or more than it will be on DVD and they don’t have to come up with artwork, extra features, extra nonsense, print, package, and ship the damn thing. Its digital, its practically free to copy! If the price point were lower, maybe $5, you’d get so many more people buying your shit. But they won’t and they’ll say it doesn’t work and bitch and complain some more. But honestly, is $5 too much to pay for movie that’ll be 7.99 on DVD in a couple of months when the world is completely digital?

2010
12/14
CATEGORY
General
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Matt Taibbi’s new piece on foreclosure fraud

I’m currently reading through Matt Taibbi’s new piece in the Rolling Stone about the foreclosure process in Florida: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/232611?RS_show_page=5. If you’re unsure about the big debacle we’re in with the banks this is a great read. It covers the following:

  • In Florida they don’t care about whether a foreclosure is justified, they just want to rubber stamp it
  • Banks are supposed to keep track of who owns the note to the loan and they don’t
  • Banks are creating paperwork to make it appear like they’re keeping track of the notes they own. They also submit different documentation to support their case.
  • Banks are committing fraud by falsifying documents to support their case. They basically submit a note with one set of stamps on it, which can be proven to be false in some cases. Then retrying to foreclose and submitting the same note with different information on it. Instead of, you know, actually researching and figuring it out before they try to foreclose
  • If you’re in foreclosure and you don’t have a lawyer, you’re fucked
  • Banks hire people, called robo-signers, to basically make up paperwork.
  • Banks committed fraud when they packaged together loans to sell by saying they meet a certain criteria when it can be shown in some cases that they don’t. IE a credit report was filed, income was checked, etc.
  • Rating agencies committed fraud by giving mortgage back securities triple-A ratings without looking at the details. They can claim first amendment protection for these statements though as they’re not legally obligated to tell the truth.
  • Predatory lenders are real, in that they’ll give you a loan without making sure you can pay it so they can sell it to someone else to package into a mortgage backed-security. The government might have fixed this to make it illegal, but it still happened for several years unchecked.
  • The government is protecting banks instead of people by not creating laws to prevent this sort of thing, nor prosecuting fraud, and basically giving a blind eye because it makes everyone look bad on their end.
  • Loan modification programs tell you to stop making payments before they can help you. Which then starts the automatic foreclosure proceedings against your home. These can often and probably almost always end up in foreclosure.
  • If you don’t make a payment, the loan servicer has to pay into the trust setup for the Mortgage-backed-security part of it. So they’d rather just foreclose than try to unwind and help you continue to make payments.
  • BOTTOM LINE: We’re fucked. The banks get away with fraud and robbery of people’s homes. Lenders get away with fraud. The courts don’t give a rats ass about anything and merely want less work to do, so they’re not upholding their oaths to uphold the law and allowing this fraud.

I really can’t keep reading stuff like this, its so depressing. But it is enlightening and I thank Matt for doing a great job making this whole confusing debacle understandable and a little bit entertaining, like going to the dentist and getting your teeth pulled without Novocaine when nothing is the matter with them.

2010
11/11
CATEGORY
General
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At Bank of America, we love fees.*

I refinanced my mortgage two months ago to take advantage of the low rates and to save a couple of bucks here and there. I went through a loan broker who chose Bank of America for the loan. I didn’t expect anything strange, this is my second refinance. In the first statement there is a notice of a fee regarding early pay-off. Which is odd because there should be no early pay-off fees, this was disclosed as part of escrow. I guess if I have an issue I’ll have to wait until I refinance and see if I get hit with the fee. Another strange thing is I’m supposed to send stuff to BAC Home Loans but I logged in to their site today. Actually before I go into that, I signed up for an account with them last week and today they sent me a password in the mail. What the hell is that? Anyway, I log into their site and my payment is due on the 15th. I go to pay online and see I’ll have to pay a fee to pay online for it to post on time… I’ve been with Chase, Everhome, and some other mortgage account I forget before and they’ve never had a fee structure for paying online that I remember. I could make a payment on the 15th and no fee and it’d be posted in time. Bank of America must be all about fees! If I have any issues I’ll probably end up refinancing just to get away from them, probably to my nice Credit Union. Glad to support BofA with fees and taxpayer bailout. So the man at the top can take home $100mil+ this year. Something is seriously wrong with our society…

*NOTE: I didn’t include this before but for some reason I feel I need to include it now. I am not affiliated with Bank of America in any way, shape, or form and I do not represent them in any way. This statement does not reflect Bank of America’s position on themselves or whatever. Basically I’m saying it in jest.

2010
11/08
CATEGORY
General
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Fixed a strange Eclipse and Ubuntu error

I started to develop some applications via Eclipse using Apache Wicket. I’m using the maven plugin for eclipse and using the wicket archetype to setup the project. One issue I have on Linux that I didn’t have on Windows is that I was unable to run on server, so I couldn’t debug or view my code changes live. I’m using Eclipse Helios, Java JDK 1.6.0 Update 21, Ubuntu 10.04. One issue perhaps is that I’m using the amd64 version (x86_64 or whatever its now called). After reinstalling Java and Eclipse multiple times I finally found out the problem. Out of the box I have to change the project settings. Under the Properties for a project I click Project Facets and change Java 1.5 to Java 1.4 and amazingly, that fixed it. If you’re running into a similar problem, try that out! It took my a while to figure it out, and I don’t know why it works but it does.

2010
09/24
CATEGORY
Computers
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