Is it immoral to purchase a home that is being sold due to foreclosure?
Question:
Answer:
The homeowners, when purchasing the house, voluntarily asked a mortgage company to lend them several hundred thousand dollars to buy the house.
The homeowners said the bank could have the property if they ever went into default on the loan payments, knowing that financial hardships can strike anyone, at any time.
For one reason or another, this is exactly what happened. The homeowners did not have enough cash on hand to continue to make the payments.
The bank enforced the contract and, in order to take the asset in lieu of payments on the loan, initiated foreclosure proceedings, after asking the homeowners to pay the loan.
State law gives homeowners several months (sometimes more than a year) to come up with the money to pay the loan back or reinstate it.
The homeowners failed to take advantage of that time, and had continued to fail in their promise to repay a loan that they voluntarily took out.
That's not really ambulance-chasing, since the homeowners voluntarily took out the mortgage, and promised the house if they could not pay the mortgage. The process may have worked exactly as it was planned.
If you can get a good deal on a house, so much the better for you, but the foreclosure process looks pretty straight-forward in its concepts. You may also want to consider learning from others' mistakes, and establish an emergency fund to pay the mortgage in case you face a financial hardship.
Good luck.
ForeclosureFish
http://www.foreclosurefish.com/...
I say get a forclosed home. Thats what I'm looking into myself. It can save you a lot of money. A lot of forclosed homes are a year or 2 old and you can get them for half the price they were originally purchsed at. You wont be benefitting from someone elses misfortune, you'll be getting a home that you and your family will enjoy living in.
Personally, if you don't buy it someone else will...
Here is the deal with forclosure, you can buy the house at forclosure sale, generally the current owner has 6 months to bring the house current on payments and requalify for the loan before they are booted out...so it isn't like you are stealing the house out from under them, they have a chance to make things right before they are booted out.
It's not immoral at all. I mean, what should we allow to happen? The house to sit there for eternity, rotting away, doing nothing? That's not fair to the house! The poor house did nothing wrong! It deserves to be bought and lived in by a nice family who will take care of it. :)
you would actually be helping these people- if you purchase and they have some equity in the property- they do get something back. They are either in bad times or they are poor financial decision makers. Your husband needs to understand the real estate business and mortgages better.
My husbands old house- 12 years old is sitting and rotting because it does not have a loving family to take care of it. We NEED buyers for these homes to bring up other values if people start to fix them up.
I don't think it's immoral. The bottom line is that someone has bought a house and (for some reason) hasn't paid the mortgage. The lender has foreclosed long before you came on the scene.
Furthermore, if there weren't the threat of foreclosure, it seems like many people (although by all means not all) simply wouldn't pay their payments. Obviously the stability of the housing market is dependent upon the fact that homes have to be paid for, or else they are foreclosed. Else we'd have a country filled with people living in homes and not paying for them.
By the time the house reaches a selling point what is done is done. By buying the house for a fair price you are actually doing a service to the person who lost it because they obviously owe more than it's worth. The closer the sale price comes to the owed price the better off the person is. Unless they are going bankrupt anyway in which case you should try to get the cheapest price because the bank should have been more careful.
I agree that someone is going to buy the property, so why not you? We struggled with this issue when we were buying our house, and I wish that we had bought a foreclosed house.
Immoral ? This has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with business skills. Did YOU put these people out of their house -- NO. Were the people who were foreclosed on immoral - you will never know (maybe they were greedy and bought the house to flip it and make a killing with the escalating house prices )
The bank has all ready taken the immorality out of it -- they made the decision that the best thing for them and the investors ( I am one and if you have any savings in a bank you are one) to recoup their investments was to terminate an agreement that the people who had the mortgage agreed to live by. \
My son lives in CA and is trying to find a house he can afford but can't -- are the people asking for too much money immoral ?
Live your life in this world with goodness in your heart, a sound business code and you will do all right.
Good luck
No, I don't. That's like not shopping an estate sale because you don't want to buy things from someone that was left just because they died.
Life goes on.
If nobody buys foreclosures, the banks will only tighten their restrictions and make the dream of home ownership more difficult.
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