Random Notes: ReFi, Toilets, Money and Mourning

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Because I still don’t have time to write a real post, but miss you enough to ramble:

We had the appraisal for the re-fi last Friday. It took him 4 minutes! That’s good, right?

A plumber also visited last Friday, and pronounced that we need a new toilet. Also, some of that recycled toilet paper, not the ultra-soft kind that is killing the environment. Right now what we have is softer than even the kind we usually buy, because we can never actually remember the kind we usually buy.

My sitter is leaving for a full-time position at her other job. I’m happy for her, but sad for us. (Mourning.)

I’m reading “Money,” by Martin Amis, a novel set in the ’80s that feels like a timeless elegy for right now. (Mourning.) Favorite line: “When it’s cold. That’s when you really feel your money.”

Mourning is normal, right? Are you doing this, too? Even as you go about your day to day? Even if you’re not laid off, and you still live in your house? It seeps in.

I’ll end with some comic justice. Some homeowners are staying put simply because their mortgage has changed hands so many times that the lender looking to foreclose can’t prove that they own it.

Garcia has another case in which a borrower tried to sell his home but could not because the note underlying a $60,000 second mortgage could not be found. The statute of limitations on the matter will expire in October, he said, and if the note holder has not come forward by then, the borrower will be free of his obligation on the second mortgage.

No one knows how many loans went into securitization trusts with defective documentation. But as messes go, this one has, ahem, potential. According to Inside Mortgage Finance, some eight million nonprime mortgages were put into securities pools in 2005 and 2006 and sold to investors. The value of these loans was $797 billion in 2005 and $815 billion in 2006.

Bookkeeping is such a bore, especially when there are billions to be made shoveling loans into trusts like coal into the Titanic’s boilers. You can imagine the thought process: Assigning notes takes time and costs money, why bother? Who’s going to ask for proof of ownership of these notes, anyhow?