#Mortgages and Financing

[windowshopgoaindia]

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[retrogamingblog2]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Leveraged buyouts are not like mortgages

I'm coming to DEFCON! On FRIDAY (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Here's an open secret: the confusing jargon of finance is not the product of some inherent complexity that requires a whole new vocabulary. Rather, finance-talk is all obfuscation, because if we called finance tactics by their plain-language names, it would be obvious that the sector exists to defraud the public and loot the real economy.

Take "leveraged buyout," a polite name for stealing a whole goddamned company:

Identify a company that owns valuable assets that are required for its continued operation, such as the real-estate occupied by its outlets, or even its lines of credit with suppliers;

Approach lenders (usually banks) and ask for money to buy the company, offering the company itself (which you don't own!) as collateral on the loan;

Offer some of those loaned funds to shareholders of the company and convince a key block of those shareholders (for example, executives with large stock grants, or speculators who've acquired large positions in the company, or people who've inherited shares from early investors but are disengaged from the operation of the firm) to demand that the company be sold to the looters;

Call a vote on selling the company at the promised price, counting on the fact that many investors will not participate in that vote (for example, the big index funds like Vanguard almost never vote on motions like this), which means that a minority of shareholders can force the sale;

Once you own the company, start to strip-mine its assets: sell its real-estate, start stiffing suppliers, fire masses of workers, all in the name of "repaying the debts" that you took on to buy the company.

This process has its own euphemistic jargon, for example, "rightsizing" for layoffs, or "introducing efficiencies" for stiffing suppliers or selling key assets and leasing them back. The looters – usually organized as private equity funds or hedge funds – will extract all the liquid capital – and give it to themselves as a "special dividend." Increasingly, there's also a "divi recap," which is a euphemism for borrowing even more money backed by the company's assets and then handing it to the private equity fund:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/17/divi-recaps/#graebers-ghost

If you're a Sopranos fan, this will all sound familiar, because when the (comparatively honest) mafia does this to a business, it's called a "bust-out":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out

The mafia destroys businesses on a onesy-twosey, retail scale; but private equity and hedge funds do their plunder wholesale.

It's how they killed Red Lobster:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

And it's what they did to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house

It's what happened to nursing homes, Armark, private prisons, funeral homes, pet groomers, nursing homes, Toys R Us, The Olive Garden and Pet Smart:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

It's what happened to the housing co-ops of Cooper Village, Texas energy giant TXU, Old Country Buffet, Harrah's and Caesar's:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals

And it's what's slated to happen to 2.9m Boomer-owned US businesses employing 32m people, whose owners are nearing retirement:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

Now, you can't demolish that much of the US productive economy without attracting some negative attention, so the looter spin-machine has perfected some talking points to hand-wave away the criticism that borrowing money using something you don't own as collateral in order to buy it and wreck it is obviously a dishonest (and potentially criminal) destructive practice.

The most common one is that borrowing money against an asset you don't own is just like getting a mortgage. This is such a badly flawed analogy that it is really a testament to the efficacy of the baffle-em-with-bullshit gambit to convince us all that we're too stupid to understand how finance works.

Sure: if I put an offer on your house, I will go to my credit union and ask the for a mortgage that uses your house as collateral. But the difference here is that you own your house, and the only way I can buy it – the only way I can actually get that mortgage – is if you agree to sell it to me.

Owner-occupied homes typically have uncomplicated ownership structures. Typically, they're owned by an individual or a couple. Sometimes they're the property of an estate that's divided up among multiple heirs, whose relationship is mediated by a will and a probate court. Title can be contested through a divorce, where disputes are settled by a divorce court. At the outer edge of complexity, you get things like polycules or lifelong roommates who've formed an LLC s they can own a house among several parties, but the LLC will have bylaws, and typically all those co-owners will be fully engaged in any sale process.

Leveraged buyouts don't target companies with simple ownership structures. They depend on firms whose equity is split among many parties, some of whom will be utterly disengaged from the firm's daily operations – say, the kids of an early employee who got a big stock grant but left before the company grew up. The looter needs to convince a few of these "owners" to force a vote on the acquisition, and then rely on the idea that many of the other shareholders will simply abstain from a vote. Asset managers are ubiquitous absentee owners who own large stakes in literally every major firm in the economy. The big funds – Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street – "buy the whole market" (a big share in every top-capitalized firm on a given stock exchange) and then seek to deliver returns equal to the overall performance of the market. If the market goes up by 5%, the index funds need to grow by 5%. If the market goes down by 5%, then so do those funds. The managers of those funds are trying to match the performance of the market, not improve on it (by voting on corporate governance decisions, say), or to beat it (by only buying stocks of companies they judge to be good bets):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/17/shareholder-socialism/#asset-manager-capitalism

Your family home is nothing like one of these companies. It doesn't have a bunch of minority shareholders who can force a vote, or a large block of disengaged "owners" who won't show up when that vote is called. There isn't a class of senior managers – Chief Kitchen Officer! – who have been granted large blocks of options that let them have a say in whether you will become homeless.

Now, there are homes that fit this description, and they're a fucking disaster. These are the "heirs property" homes, generally owned by the Black descendants of enslaved people who were given the proverbial 40 acres and a mule. Many prosperous majority Black settlements in the American South are composed of these kinds of lots.

Given the historical context – illiterate ex-slaves getting property as reparations or as reward for fighting with the Union Army – the titles for these lands are often muddy, with informal transfers from parents to kids sorted out with handshakes and not memorialized by hiring lawyers to update the deeds. This has created an irresistible opportunity for a certain kind of scammer, who will pull the deeds, hire genealogists to map the family trees of the original owners, and locate distant descendants with homeopathically small claims on the property. These descendants don't even know they own these claims, don't even know about these ancestors, and when they're offered a few thousand bucks for their claim, they naturally take it.

Now, armed with a claim on the property, the heirs property scammers force an auction of it, keeping the process under wraps until the last instant. If they're really lucky, they're the only bidder and they can buy the entire property for pennies on the dollar and then evict the family that has lived on it since Reconstruction. Sometimes, the family will get wind of the scam and show up to bid against the scammer, but the scammer has deep capital reserves and can easily win the auction, with the same result:

https://www.propublica.org/series/dispossessed

A similar outrage has been playing out for years in Hawai'i, where indigenous familial claims on ancestral lands have been diffused through descendants who don't even know they're co-owner of a place where their distant cousins have lived since pre-colonial times. These descendants are offered small sums to part with their stakes, which allows the speculator to force a sale and kick the indigenous Hawai'ians off their family lands so they can be turned into condos or hotels. Mark Zuckerberg used this "quiet title and partition" scam to dispossess hundreds of Hawai'ian families:

https://archive.is/g1YZ4

Heirs property and quiet title and partition are a much better analogy to a leveraged buyout than a mortgage is, because they're ways of stealing something valuable from people who depend on it and maintain it, and smashing it and selling it off.

Strip away all the jargon, and private equity is just another scam, albeit one with pretensions to respectability. Its practitioners are ripoff artists. You know the notorious "carried interest loophole" that politicians periodically discover and decry? "Carried interest" has nothing to do with the interest on a loan. The "carried interest" rule dates back to 16th century sea-captains, and it refers to the "interest" they had in the cargo they "carried":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

Private equity managers are like sea captains in exactly the same way that leveraged buyouts are like mortgages: not at all.

And it's not like private equity is good to its investors: scams like "continuation funds" allow PE looters to steal all the money they made from strip mining valuable companies, so they show no profits on paper when it comes time to pay their investors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/20/continuation-fraud/#buyout-groups

Those investors are just as bamboozled as we are, which is why they keep giving more money to PE funds. Today, the "dry powder" (uninvested money) that PE holds has reached an all-time record high of $2.62 trillion – money from pension funds and rich people and sovereign wealth funds, stockpiled in anticipation of buying and destroying even more profitable, productive, useful businesses:

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2di1vzgjcmzovkcea8f0g/portfolio/private-equitys-dry-powder-mountain-reaches-record-height

The practices of PE are crooked as hell, and it's only the fact that they use euphemisms and deceptive analogies to home mortgages that keeps them from being shut down. The more we strip away the bullshit, the faster we'll be able to kill this cancer, and the more of the real economy we'll be able to preserve.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/05/rugged-individuals/#misleading-by-analogy

[bitchesgetriches]

{ MASTERPOST } Everything You Need to Know about How to Pay off Debt

Understanding debt:

Let’s End This Damaging Misconception About Credit Cards

Season 2, Episode 10: “Which Is Smarter: Getting a Loan? or Saving up to Pay Cash?”

Dafuq Is Interest? And How Does It Work for the Forces of Darkness?

Investing Deathmatch: Paying off Debt vs. Investing in the Stock Market

How to Build Good Credit Without Going Into Debt

Dafuq Is a Down Payment? And Why Do You Need One to Buy Stuff?

It’s More Expensive to Be Poor Than to Be Rich

Making Decisions Under Stress: The Siren Song of Chocolate Cake

How Mental Health Affects Your Finances

Paying off debt:

Kill Your Debt Faster with the Death by a Thousand Cuts Technique

Share My Horror: The World’s Worst Debt Visualization

The Best Way To Pay off Credit Card Debt: From the Snowball To the Avalanche

The Debt-Killing Power of Rounding up Bills

A Dungeonmaster’s Guide to Defeating Debt

How to Pay Hospital Bills When You’re Flat Broke 

Ask the Bitches Pandemic Lightning Round: “What Do I Do If I Can’t Pay My Bills?” 

Slay Your Financial Vampires

Season 4, Episode 3: “My credit card debt is slowly crushing me. Is there any escape from this horrible cycle?” 

Case Study: Held Back by Past Financial Mistakes, Fighting Bad Credit and $90K in Debt 

Student loan debt:

What We Talk About When We Talk About Student Loans

Ask the Bitches: “The Government Put Student Loans in Forbearance. Can I Stop Paying—or Is It a Trap?”

How to Pay for College without Selling Your Soul to the Devil

When (and How) to Try Refinancing or Consolidating Student Loans

Ask the Bitches: I Want to Move Out, but I Can’t Afford It. How Bad Would It Be to Take out Student Loans to Cover It?

Season 4, Episode 4: “I’m $100K in Student Loan Debt and I Think It Should Be Forgiven. Does This Make Me an Entitled Asshole?” 

The 2022 Student Loan Forgiveness FAQ You’ve Been Waiting For

2023 Student Loan Forgiveness Update: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly 

Our Final Word on Student Loan Forgiveness 

Avoiding debt:

Ask Not How Much You Should Save, Ask How Much You Should Spend 

How to Make Any Financial Decision, No Matter How Tough, with Maximum Swag

Your Yearly Free Medical Care Checklist

Two-Ring Circus 

Status Symbols Are Pointless and Dumb 

Advice I Wish My Parents Gave Me When I Was 16 

On Emergency Fund Remorse… and Bacon Emergencies

Should You Increase Your Salary or Decrease Your Spending? 

Don’t Spend Money on Shit You Don’t Like, Fool

The Magically Frugal Power of Patience

The Only Advice You’ll Ever Need for a Cheap-Ass Wedding 

The Most Impactful Financial Decision I’ve Ever Made… and Why I Don’t Recommend It 

3 Times I Was Damn Grateful for My Emergency Fund (and Side Income) 

Buy Now Pay Later Apps: That Old Predatory Lending by a Crappy New Name 

Credit Card Companies HATE Her! Stay Out of Credit Card Debt With This One Weird Trick 

Ask the Bitches: Should I Get a Loan Even Though I Can Afford To Pay Cash? 

The Bitches vs. debt:

I Paid off My Student Loans Ahead of Schedule. Here’s How.

I Paid off My Student Loans. Now What?

Hurricane Debt Weakens to Tropical Storm Debt, but Experts Warn It’s Still Debt

The Real Story of How I Paid Off My Mortgage Early in 4 Years

Case Study: Swimming Upstream against Unemployment, Exhaustion, and $2,750 a Month in Unproductive Spending 

That’s all for now! We try to update these masterposts periodically, so check back for more in… a couple… months??? Maybe????

[pottlewealth]

What is Donald Trump going to do? He needs tens or hundreds of millions for his lawyers, his campaign and to pay jury awards of $400 million or more. His Truth Social stock (ticker: DJT) is tanking. Our newest video shows that this stock may well fall to $3 per share over the next year. Discover the 6 reasons that this stock is a dumpster fire. Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment on our YouTube channel. Thanks.

[grandpeachpanda]

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[border-collie]

Can't afford to rent because I have two dogs, can't afford to buy because I don't have a 10% down payment. Stuck in living-at-parents purgatory.

[cw-ianthe]

would really like my mortgage to come through before 2025 so I don't end up homeless when my lease runs out please please please

[gothicprep]

i'm never going to do it because it'd be insanely rude, but whenever I hear someone saying something about "at this rate, i'll never be able to buy a house!" i always want to ask them why they'd like to buy a house.

i often get the sense in these conversations that the person i'm talking to is mostly stressed about not hitting a Life Milestone and it's not really a matter of "i want a house because [reason that isn't FOMO”] and not “can't afford one"

[phregnancy]

This is so random but i just want to share my thoughts. Sometimes i kinda dislike it when they mentioned they have a mortgage and we should support them by buying merch and stuff. I know it's kinda a joke and its cute that they share a mortgage and its sort of make them relatable, but it really is not relatable. They are in a whole different tax bracket than most of their viewers. And I really think they are a lot richer than a lot of us think they are. From what they showed us in older videos, they sort of lived below their means before they moved into their home now, which props to them because we see a lot of youtubers were splurging on luxury shits right when they start making money. But like buying a custom built house with that size in Central London... is very very expensive... and yes I know they have mortgage but like having a mortgage doesn't always mean they don't have the means to pay the house in full. They won't purchase a house that cant afford. Besides, they were not that active for a couple of years and still be able to keep the house. Some people just like to not put all their savings in one property.... with them, i imagine they would like to have the cash flow to invest on tours and other business adventures.

I am NOT saying that all they do is for cashgrab because this is their JOB. I love them dearly and love to support them. But I see some people mistook the whole "mortgage" thing and really underestimate the amount they make on sponsorships. All i want to say is support them however you are comfortable with. You dont always have to buy merch or go to their tour to show support!

i think if phannies knew a little more about fashion (the history of it, quality variations, and major players vs caring about personal style) they’d have a better understanding of how wealthy dnp are, for dan to blow normal people’s rent money on luxury brands’ subpar products like it’s nothing. sort of similar, i always roll my eyes when dan touts himself as an eat-the-rich anticapitalist / makes jokes about capita£ester bc.. they are both rich capitalists… we’re all part of a society and if dan and phil were given the option to give up their wealth to allow everyone to live in a moneyless utopia i’m sure they would, but as it is now they are absolutely profiting off of and playing into capitalism. not that they should be expected to take drastic action in fighting capitalism, but i do think it’s a little ridiculous for a rich british man to try and act like a communist baddie and poke fun at his rich british partner for not being one when the reality is they are both capitalists.

[voxfin]

We’ll explore the challenges faced by individuals with bad credit scores in Australia and how expert home loan mortgage brokers at VOXFIN can assist them in achieving their dream of homeownership.

[retrogamingblog2]

[fundrraustralia]

https://fundrr.com.au

Business & Personal Loans | Mortgage Broker - Fundrr Australia

Fundrr Australia offers a wide range of financial solutions, including consumer car loans, commercial car loans, personal loans, refinancing options, insurance, and more.

[bitchesgetriches]

Cheat on Your Bank—It’s Not Your Girlfriend

When it comes to banks, I am a proud philanderer. Practically a libertine! A player! I keep money here, I keep money there… it all depends on what’s most useful and effective for both my long- and short-term money goals. Here’s where I keep my money and why:

Bank 1: A large regional bank with lots of branches and ATMs in my area. Home of my checking and savings accounts. I keep these two accounts at the same bank so I can easily and quickly transfer between them.

Bank 2: An online-only bank. This is where I have the high yield savings account that I use as my emergency fund.

Bank 3: It’s fucking Vanguard, y’all. Birthplace of the low-cost index fund itself. Here I have my Roth IRA and non-retirement general brokerage account.

Bank 4: The bank my employer uses for employee retirement accounts. I don’t really have a choice on this one, so it’s just where my 401(k) lives.

Bank 5: Our beloved sponsor Acorns, because here at Bitches Get Riches, we practice what we preach. This is my happy little micro-investing account.

Start investing today with Acorns

Bank 6: Home of my very first credit card, Credit Card A. Because a long credit history is good for my credit score, I’ll likely never close this card. This is also where I keep the joint checking account I share with my husband for bills and household maintenance. This bank is the only one we share, as our finances are mostly separate.

Bank 7: Home of my second credit card, Credit Card B… which comes with a sweet rewards program.

Bank 8: Last but not least, this is a bank that specializes in small business banking. And it’s where Kitty and I keep the joint business checking account that we use for Bitches Get Riches.

That’s eight banks. I’m basically the titular boy in Brandy and Monica’s 1998 classic The Boy Is Mine.

Keep reading

[superaquafishy]

If you want to be a homeowner before your 30 it's actually really easy! I managed to do it just follow these 3 simple steps.

1. Have a household income of over 100k a year. Otherwise you will never be able to afford a mortgage or the upkeep and maintenance the house will need. People think finding a high paying job can be done through hard work or education but actually it's easiest to get it through white male privilege or nepotism.

2. Have no debt. Student loans, car loans, and other debts could hold you back from getting a mortgage. Try paying them off by cutting unnecessary expenses out of your life like Starbucks, medical bills, and your family.

3. Somehow get at least $50,000. The easiest way is to inherit this money so if you have any old rich relatives butter them up now, and don't forget to cough on them while you do it. You could try saving this money but rent prices that will be near impossible. If you are really dedicated and you're willing to sacrifice things like food, pets, and anything else that brings you joy or happiness it can be done.

Once you have this homeownership should come easy. You will have to act fast though because any property worth owning in your city is being purchased by investment corporations and landlords. If you wait too long even the really shitty homes will be forever out of your budget. Hope this helps!