Harsh? I prefer to think of it as honest. Yes, Ms. Seranno and her husband made a poor decision buying at the very top of an obvious bubble. Yes, I think they should be more careful next time. No, I don’t think they "deserve" anything from me, or you, or this guy.
The adage that timing is everything takes on even greater meaning in a recession-battered economy, where the outcome of every business decision is good, bad or uncertain.
Just ask Joey Rispaud, Michael Vosganian and Kaveh Ebrahimi, who, by sheer serendipity, are stars in a three-act play set in the year-old recession - a drama playing out with a cliffhanger ending.
Joey Rispaud’s timing could not have been better, or more impressive.
After graduating last summer from California State University, Northridge, he put three goals on his agenda: Marry his fiance, buy a home and start a family. He’s done all three.
"I accomplished all the goals I wanted to accomplish in becoming an adult," said Rispaud, 27, a manager at the TGI Friday’s in Woodland Hills.
It sounds simple, but it wasn’t.
Rispaud and his bride, Diana, paid $279,000 for a two-bedroom, two-bath townhome in Saugus, a short sale put together by his wife’s mother, Anita Levy, an agent at the Remax office in Santa Clarita.
The couple moved in on Dec. 8, one year after the recession officially started. They are paying about $2,000 a month for their mortgage - just a little more than what they were paying for the two-bedroom apartment they’d been renting in Reseda.
They bought the house the old-fashioned way: They saved enough to put down a 3.5 percent deposit, and secured a 6 percent fixed-rate loan.
Rispaud had been looking for a house since 2006, and sometimes wondered if he’d ever be a homeowner. Even after they found the Saugus town home, it took five months to close the deal.
But Rispaud is patient - an asset that allowed him to wait out an overheated real-estate market.
"We could easily have gotten a $600,000 or a $700,000 home at a zero-percent interest rate for five years, but there was no way I could afford that (kind) of house," he said. "One way or another we were going to get stuck."
Of course, there was a lot of second-guessing from friends who would drop by Friday’s and tell Rispaud he was an "idiot" for not taking the real estate bait as housing prices soared.
"Now they are upside-down or bankrupt. It worked out for my wife and I really well," he said.
Yay Joey! Way to defer your immediate gratification and live within your means!
I think it’s past time for us to honestly face our past mistakes and errant trajectory, and not just about sloppy house-buying practices either.
How are we ever going to tackle the larger challenge of facing up to the fact that we are on an unsustainable path with respect to the Three Es if we cannot stomach the thought of even relatively minor economic miscues having consequences?
What are the long-term prospects of a society that rewards living beyond one’s means and does so by removing money and opportunity from those who didn’t? Are we really all entitled, whether bankers or homeowners, to have others pay for our mistakes?
If the answer is "yes" I need to drastically change how I am raising my children because I am quite firm when it comes to linking their actions with consequences.
I am all for helping people out, but I think that should be at the individual, family and community level.
Or maybe I’ll revisit my plan 10 years ago to do a top law school so I can join the oligarchy and screw the bourgeois out of its cash…why fight em when I can join em. 