June Reyno chained herself to her foreclosed home last year.
Who isn’t angry at greedy lenders who irresponsibly locked borrowers into home loans knowing they wouldn’t be able to afford the payments? The demise of our economy can easily be traced back to deceptive subprime mortgages, but homeowners also need to take responsibility for their actions.
You might remember June Reyno, a Mira Mesa woman who made headlines a few months back for chaining herself to her foreclosed home and refusing to leave. Reyno, who took hundreds of thousands of dollars of equity out of the home, is back in the news for breaking a window and reentering her property (someone else’s property now, actually) after the sheriff came by to evict her. Despite losing every court fight thus far, Reyno blames her situation on a mortgage broker who, she says, gave her bad advice.
As silly as Reyno’s as tactics may seem, I think we can all empathize with her on some level. It would feel good to let out all of our aggression and blame financial problems on credit card companies, mortgage lenders and failing banks. To say there are unfair lending practices is like pointing out that the sky is blue, but at the end of the day, mortgage companies aren’t the ones taking out home equity lines of credit. Similarly, banks don’t force customers to max out their credit cards.
Our aspirations to fulfill the American Dream have left many of us with a bunch of stuff we don’t need and more debt than we can ever hope to pay back. Taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars in home equity lines of credit is never a good idea, unless you’re using it to pay off high-interest debt and you are certain you will be able to pay your new mortgage. We also need to thoroughly research the "big" financial decisions in life and remember that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
I wish Ms. Reyno luck, but I don’t think the new owner of her home is going to be to happy that they already have a tenant.
