Irvine Housing Blog

> After repeatedly missing work due to illness, Ms. Graci went on long-term disability.

Long-term disability is one of the biggest and most expensive scams facing our society.

Unlike unemployment insurance, which eventually expires, long-term disability lasts as long as you can fool a doctor into believing that you can’t work.

And once people get used to free mailbox money, they never seem to get better.

Getting sick over a house, one needs to ask:  Do I own the house or does the house own me?

Remember it’s a house and not a home.  You can get another place to live but you only have one body and non-replaceable family.  what’s the worse that can happen with a FC and without the FC?  The FC only removes you from the house and debt.  Credit blemish for for a few years.

Is reaching FC state the cause of the illness or just another symptom?

I though that the current easy issue of obtaining long-term disability was a govt plot to keep down the unemployment rate that will result in unintented consequences.  A BHO plan for lowering the unemployment rate, so he could keep up his ratings.  Chart unemployment plus new disability claims to see a clearer picture of the health of labor. Some might get better with a better outlook.  Long-term over worked and over stressed with little to no hope are a deadly combination for the body (heart and other internal organs).

Without the ISD, the price is high.  A 2 bd is small for a family with kids.

The 39% increase in suicide attempts is by far the most alarming statistic in this story. Absolutely horrific.

I bet the authors could have found those same correlations with any number of different factors, including increases in demands for mental health services (depression), increases in divorces filed, and an uptick in business for UHaul.

Emergency room call surge is tied to unemployment, thus medicaid use, not seeing doctor in usual course until too late.  People have lost health insurance, copays are up anyway, and part timers (and those working for cash) are counted as employed yet often have no health benefit at all, plus are frightened to spend money.  Divorce filings go down markedly in a recession, so do bankruptcy filings (at least for a while). 
  IHB grabbed my attention with reference to Homestead Fla. and immediate surrounding areas. Go to zillow and see their best estimates of the drop in the last year and over ten years of those zip codes.  Think Las Vegas and Irvine can’t still, after all this dropping, do that kind of price cliff diving? I used to think that; this isn’t any kind of “correction” found in standard economics.

One can use economic and price modelling software available, and common sense modelling.  The homes/commercial property price crash of that Homestead area over five years is theoretically impossible.  Also if one does ten years with inflation adjusting and square foot/age adjustments.  Worse, every single person who bought there in the last five, ten years, is now underwater; so is their bank, so is the bank’s guarantor fdic, so is the government.  Those trillions(?) of 2006 equity of Florida are wiped out, taking the majority of the net worth of the middle class right with them.  What the heck are the real top three factors there, why there, and how does that portend for elsewhere, especially Las Vegas, Phoenix.  Ditto I can’t figure out the extent of Minneapolis slide (or why Boston doesn’t, edu-dollars?).
  Thanks for the jolt, ihb.

“Homestead, Fla., a city of mostly single-family, middle-class homes about 30 miles from Miami.”

That statement is a laugher…Homestead, FL is a ghetto of mostly Haitian immigrants…and also (when I lived in S. Florida) had one of the highest HIV infection rates per capita in the US.  Certainly not the middle class bedroom community that they paint it to be.

My neighbors haven’t made a payment since December 2008. 

In 2009, they filed BK (chapter 13, then 11). 
In 2010, they got a divorce and their BK case was dismissed.
In 2011, they refiled BK (chapter 7).  BofA finally asked for relief from stay in June, but has postponed the foreclosure sale 3 times already.

One more thing, they are both RE agents.  They know how to play the game baby!

I have noticed more interest this year for wallpaper and wallpaper hangers. It has been very slow since 2008. For those not losing their home, it seems they are cocooning again or starting to.