Giving Credit Where (subprime) Credit is Due

Winter night descends after a day of progress.

Yes, there are some good people out there who respond when they received emails from members of the insane short sale rabble. I salute them, as follows:

The woman at Deutsche Bank who got into work early and responded to my email right away. The email was addressed (using an email address found by Googling) to a high DB executive. The nice women's email came back to me at something like 8 a.m. DB is reportedly the investor in the second mortgage. They say they're looking into, and will get back to me. If they can even find a single second mortgage buried within the mountain of mortgage backed securities in their portfolios, I'll be stunned.

The woman in the media relations department of GMAC who also responded to a totaly out of the blue email. It's not her job to respond to emails from short sale crackpots. But she did, and she promised to forward my email to the right department. I can't get over it. Faith being restored here.

And other, minor progress. Like getting an alternate fax number from the people at Bank of America credit card litigation support. Their fax machine hasn't been working for two days, they won't give us their email, and we don't have their address. Thanks.

Liens: they don't really make sense, so maybe it's time to challenge the accepted wisdom

And finally, thanks to My Muse. For now I am contemplating the very nature of the real estate lien? What exactly does it mean? How can a credit card company put a lien on a house? A credit card is not secured by real estate. And what if Man A buys a house from Family B, with a credit card lien that was placed on the house because Family B went broke and couldn't pay. If there's no equity in the house, why should Man A owe a cent to the credit card company. anyway?

You could carry that one further and wonder about why a home equity line of credit company has any right to a property that is sold at short sale. Yes, the loan was secured by the house. But if the house goes to a short sale with no equity, shouldn't the HELOC just be erased? The HELOC lost out, that was the risk they were taking. So whys should it be the new home owners headache? Has anyone gone to court on this? Googling provides very little insight. I will research and get back to y'all.