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 When caught in the act, bankers change their stories.
This is a continuation of my interview with Nye Lavalle. Sixteen years ago, he began investigating mortgage fraud when a bank attempted to wrongfully foreclose on a family property. Many of the issues he uncovered more than a decade ago, like robo-signing, are just being recognized today. Lavalle continues to try educate others about problems in the banking industry and the US economy.
Nye Lavalle: That’s why it was funny in Florida when that bank said they lost a note. I would kind of laugh, how do you lose a $2.5 million note? That’s like $2.5 million floating around somewhere.
Jennifer Barry: There is some evidence that the banks aren’t necessarily losing the notes so much as destroying them.
NL: But why would someone destroy a $2.5 million note? The only reason someone would destroy a note would be to cover up endorsements on that note which would have indicated another change of title to whomever really owned that note, so they actually destroyed the evidence.
JB: Right, I think that there’s widespread fraud in banking, so they need to “bury the bodies.” Continue reading A House of Cards, Part 3
 Before the web, Lavalle had to fly to courthouses for research. Jennifer Barry: It’s very disturbing, because this unit of Bear Stearns was pushing you around and you could actually fight back. Did you say they spent $2.5 million fighting your family?
Nye Lavalle: Over $2.5 million, and the month before trial our law firm withdrew and we got a default judgment against us. It turned out our law firm was representing Bear Stearns and hadn’t informed us of the relationship and banking interests. And we had paid them $75,000 and then capped their fees, and they racked up a $750,000 bill themselves.
JB: Wow. So why do you think that Bear Stearns spent that much money fighting over a property not worth nearly that much? Continue reading A House of Cards, Part 2
 Defaults and foreclosures are profitable for banks.
Nye Lavalle is best known for his sports predictions. With his family, he founded Sports Marketing Group and stunned many sportswriters with his accurate calls on the popularity of figure skating and NASCAR in the 1990s, among many others. Sixteen years ago, he began investigating mortgage fraud when a bank attempted to wrongfully foreclose on a family property. Many of the issues he uncovered more than a decade ago, like robo-signing, are just being recognized today. He continues to try educate others about problems in the banking industry and the US economy. This is Part 1 of our explosive interview.
Jennifer Barry: Could you tell me a little bit about how you got interested in the whole mortgage fraud and predatory lending and things like that?
Nye Lavalle: Sure. Just to give you an idea, my email, mortgagefrauds@aol.com, has been in existence, since I believe, about 1995.
JB: That’s a very long time.
NL: It all started the night my mom and dad Anthony and Matilde Pew owned a home in Dallas, TX, that we used for our family business called Sports Marketing Group. And I had a place in New York and LA, and we were eventually going to retire to that home at first blush. But we purchased the home, and my family had money, and I had money, we were a business, and basically, soon after we closed on the loan, the bank SOA just started doing all sorts of stupid things. Nobody resided full-time in the home, and they were instructed to send the payment statements to Michigan so that they could get paid on time, and they never sent them there. They sent them to the property address and somebody wasn’t on the property for sometimes two to three months. And they wouldn’t change that. They wouldn’t take off the late fees, then when I would pay bills on time at the bank, it turned out that they would send the payments from the bank to California to the posting center, and they wouldn’t get posted for 10 more days, even though you paid it on time at the bank. And then they would put another late fee onto the account. Continue reading A House of Cards: An interview with Nye Lavalle
 US citizens can leave, but they still have to pay taxes. I continue my interview with Adrian S., a married man with a family who sold most of his possessions in search of a better life. He is disturbed about the direction the US is taking, politically, economically, and socially. Links to earlier parts of the interview can be found at the end of this post.
Jennifer Barry: I’m very concerned about the effect of the housing bust on the US. The people who bought near the top could wait more than a decade to see the prices rebound. Too many won’t be able to hold on that long. A lot of these middle-class families aren’t middle-class anymore, they just don’t know it yet.
Adrian S.: Yeah, I feel like a whole new system is being put into place. But people are buying into this idea that it’s all just a big accident, we didn’t realize what was going to happen if we had all these crazy derivatives and such and that the bankers were just a little over-enthusiastic and they’re sorry. Continue reading Stranger in His Own Land, Part 12
I’m proud to say that today is the one year anniversary of Live Richly. I didn’t know if it would last this long. I started it as an experiment to learn about social media and marketing, but it turned out I really liked blogging for its own sake.
One of the best part [...]
 I believe in taking responsibility for my financial decisions, whether the outcome is good or bad. I’ve regularly paid on my loans for graduate school for the past 14 years, even though professors lied to students about their job prospects and minimum salaries. I continue to write checks to Sallie Mae, even though graduates who entered social work a few years later than myself received loan forgiveness, and I haven’t even worked in the field since 2001.
I’ve always believed in the philosophy, “You made your bed, now lie in it.” When I lost half my savings in the stock market crash of 2000, I figured it was my fault for not understanding what I was investing in. I’ve never collected unemployment or other benefits even when I qualified for them, since I was always able to (mostly) scrape by with a poorly paid job. If you asked me just 10 years ago if homeowners should continue to pay on their underwater mortgages, I would have said, “Absolutely.”
However, the current US housing armageddon has caused me to change my mind. Continue reading In Defense of Default
 I continue my interview with Adrian S., a married man with a family who sold most of his possessions in search of a better life. He is disturbed about the direction the US is taking, politically, economically, and socially. Links to earlier parts of the interview can be found at the end of this post.
Jennifer Barry: So, do your kids have plans to go to college at some point, or start their own business? What do they think they want to do in their future?
Adrian S.: I’m definitely promoting the idea that life is not about getting a good job. I’m promoting the idea that being able to be entrepreneurial and finding out how to satisfy people’s needs is a better way of going about life.
I’m trying to be honest with them about college too, because I think the landscape of the world has changed. It’s not like a college degree is absolutely essential to have a fulfilling life. And that was the way it was always presented to me, but I suspect that they will want to go to college, but I just want them to go knowing why they’re there. I went to college just because it was just the thing you do after high school. My parents never really explained to me what the point was. Continue reading Stranger in His Own Land, Part 11
A couple of weeks ago, Kevin wrote Has the Time Come Again to Invest in Real Estate? and made the case for and against investing in this area, making some excellent points. However, I think the majority of people who jump into real estate right now will be kicking themselves in a few [...]
 Retirees cut foreign vacations when the Dow falls. This is an excerpt from the October 2010 issue of Global Asset Strategist.
I continue my interview with Adrian S., a married man with a family who sold most of his possessions in search of a better life. He is disturbed about the direction the US is taking, both politically and economically. Links to earlier parts of the interview can be found at the end of this post.
Jennifer Barry: Bill Murphy has been saying for a while that he thinks the average American’s standard of living is going to fall 30%.
Adrian S.: Yes, I agree that I see that coming. The middle class is being cut at the knees right now. We look at the people that we’re staying with, our family, and they’re working very, very hard to keep things afloat. Looking years ahead, I believe there’s going to be war. It happens when you have these kinds of social cataclysms, and our son will soon become just the perfect age for a fighting young man, and so that’s one of the reasons that we want to get out. Continue reading Stranger in His Own Land, Part 9
This is an excerpt from the August 2010 issue of Global Asset Strategist.
In Canada and the US, they are commonly known as boomerang kids. They are adult children, usually in their twenties, who move back in with their parents after living independently for a while. Unlike past generations, living with parents after age 21 is not stigmatized, but rather applauded as a sensible measure to avoid racking up debt. By 2006, 43.5% of Canadians under 30 were sleeping in their old bedrooms, while in the US, 10% of Americans under age 35 have returned to their parents’ home.
For some young people, the decision is not whether to move back home, but whether to leave at all. Increasingly, the global trend is for adults to stay in their childhood bedroom well into their thirties. In Germany, dependent adult children are known as nesthockers or nest squatters. In France, pundits refer to “Tanguy syndrome,” named after a film about a 28 year old who refused to leave the family home. In New Zealand, the 20% of young men between the ages of 20 and 34 who live with parents are called “mummy’s boys.” Austria has its “Mama hotels” that are a comfortable refuge for Generation Y, while the UK has KIPPERS, or Kids In Parents’ Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings. Continue reading Boomerang Kids
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