Here’s the gist of a phone call from last week from someone who’d seen my name in the paper and gave me a call:
“I was wondering what you know about home-equity lines of credit for the unemployed. Since I have over $175,000 of equity in my home, will the bank check my income if I want to borrow $100,000 to tide me over?”
When I inquired if the caller had the ability to repay--the paramount concern of every lender nowadays--he thought that was an irrelevant question. “I told you I have lots of equity in my home, so I just want to borrow against it.”
I said I didn’t think he could get the second loan he contemplated, but that he should go ahead and try (I did advise he’d have a ding on his credit report).
When I hung up, I tried to figure out how he thought his inability to repay would be irrelevant. Was he planning to write a HELOC check to pay the monthly mortgage charges, regularly mail the lender an equitable chunk of his house, or merely forward an IOU until he got a new job?
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real_lawyer- LitaWrites
