Insurance Mortgage

Dear Bruce: I started college 15 years ago. I graduated, found a good job and now, all these years later, it has been brought to my attention when I applied for a loan for my house that my parents didn't pay off all of my school loans. Now I have to pay a debt that accrued for all those years. I was 17 when I started college and took out the loans. Am I responsible for paying back a loan from so many years ago? — P.K., via e-mail

Dear P.K.: Unhappily, the likelihood is that you are responsible. Many 17-year-olds take out loans for their college education and, yes, they are responsible for paying them back. Further, in your letter you mentioned you couldn't graduate until the bills were paid. The college was paid by the student loans. There is little doubt in my mind that, even though much time has elapsed, you are nonetheless obligated to pay.

If I were a mortgage banker ...

I've had a few mortgages in my time, and they've always been the 30-year fixed rate type. You couldn't get me to take an adjustable rate mortgage at gun point, but that's not the point of this post. What I have to say will come to most of you as an oversimplification in the face of the mortgage banking meltdown, but try as I may, I just can't make it any more complicated than this. If I was a mortgage banker facing the wholesale destruction of my lending sector, I'd suck it up quick and proceed as follows:

I would begin to contact all my mortgage clients with notes facing foreclosure, starting with the most serious cases first. I'd make the offer for fixed rate refinancing at current rates with a 2% point fee attached to the note. The 2% could be paid up front, financed with the principle, tagged to the end of the mortgage as an appendage to be paid upon sale of the property, or handled as a separate note.

Not economy, stupid. The world’s changed ()

A week after the event, almost everyone seems to agree that Gordon Browns last Budget was a competent exercise in economic management, but a serious political blunder. This may seem no great disaster to Mr Brown. He would much rather be seen as a good economic manager and a bad politician than the other way round. He feels he has plenty of time to recover from a typical mid-term wobble in the opinion polls.

That, at least, seems to be what Mr Brown tells himself when he lies awake at night worrying about his political future as he surely must do now and then. It is a reassuring story: as long as the economy stays healthy, wages and house prices keep rising, while unemployment, mortgage rates and inflation all remain far below their levels in the 1980s and 1990s, surely the voters top priority will be to keep the prosperity going.