Beware the 50-year mortgage
If the Trump Administration carries out his suggestion that 50-year mortgages will solve the housing affordability problem, I hope that people looking to buy their first home won’t fall for it. The average age of a first-time homebuyer these days is 40. Who wants to be strapped with a mortgage until they are 90 years old?
At first glance it might look tempting to get a lower monthly payment by stretching out the number of years for that mortgage. And yes, the lower monthly payment would allow more people to qualify for a loan.
But they’d also be increasing their number of payments from 360 to 600. What does that do? It increases the amount of interest they have to pay. Unwary buyers are put at risk. In the long run, they might find themselves in financial trouble by taking on too much debt.
Let’s look at an example of a $400,000 mortgage at 6.5% interest. A 30-year mortgage would charge around $510,000 in interest, but a 50-year mortgage would charge around $950,000. This means that it would take the buyer with a 50-year mortgage about $1.35 million — almost half a million more than with a 30-year mortgage — to pay off the principal and interest.
Who stands to benefit from this scheme? Banks.
Diane Dassow
Lombard
In a Nov. 21 AP story, Christine Fernando mentioned all of the details but it was difficult to follow how ghastly this all this was:
Prosecutors had accused Marimar Martinez, 30, of using her vehicle to strike Border Patrol Agent Charles Exum's car. Agent Exum exited his car and opened fire on this lady and shot her seven times, according to reports. Later in text messages, Agent Exum bragged, “I fired five rounds and she had seven holes. Put that in your books boys.” Agent Exum was allowed to drive his vehicle back to Maine even though it was possibly critical evidence.
Ms. Fernandez was charged with assaulting a federal officer with a deadly weapon — a vehicle.
Now after the defense attorneys challenged the facts, claiming that it was Agent Exum who steered into Ms. Martinez, “prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss the charges … making a dramatic reversal in one of the most closely watched cases tied to the crackdown in and around the country's third largest city.”
Since this happened in Chicago and was such a ghastly miscarriage of justice it should have been on Page 1.
Jack Halpin
Arlington Heights