Today, President Obama will travel to Denver to sign the new stimulus plan into law, and we all need to hope that it works. After that, he will be traveling to Phoenix, AZ, to announce his new plan to save the county's abysmal housing market (because Arizona is the hardest hit state).
I saw a segment on CNN this morning that made me stop and stare at the TV, mouth hanging open. It was a story about an Arizona school bus-driving mother of two (who apparently has a husband that was neither seen nor barely mentioned in this piece) who got a letter from her bank warning of impending foreclosure on her home. Like many Americans, her family is in over their heads when it comes to their mortgage, having been sweet-talked into a house that they could not afford. The price of this house? $800,000. You've got to be kidding me.
I don't know how much a school bus driver makes in Arizona (or what her husband brings in), but the fact that she thought she could afford an $800,000 home simply leaves me utterly befuddled. And she's not the only one. A while back I saw a segment on another channel about a woman who makes somewhere between $30,000-40,000 a year and decided to buy a $700,000 home.
Its true that many homebuyers got suckered into deals that they thought were favorable only to turn around and find that the situation had soured. And there are homebuyers in the country who truly need the government to come up with a plan to stop the spiral of foreclosures. But there are also those who simply do not know how to handle their personal finances, and the fact that the government might be directing money their way makes me uneasy.
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