I understand about the 5th.If you buy your property at say 500,000 and the state says its worth 225,000 under the law what is fair compensation you will get screwed over is that just compensation.I don't have the knowledge that some of you have but i know when I'm getting screwed over.

__________________
jjgross* The answer my friend is written on the wind

And there is an arcane legal argument that the VA SOL on credit cards is 2 years rather than 3. It's in a manual on Virginia law ... A Civil Operations Manual

(scan down for "pacific micronesian")

__________________
_________

"No one would have believed ... that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than Man's ... Yet across the gulf of space ... intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic ... regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly but surely drew their plans against us." - H.G. Wells, The War of The Worlds, describing how Martian JDBs think about Earthling debtors

Incorporate or form an LLC in Florida

Quite so! Others are getting beaten up with it too. I'm also wondering whether that same choice of law clause exists in most mortgage contracts as well? So far I have only seen it in credit card agreements but then I haven't actually studied any real estate contracts to see whether it is common there too or not.

You say "from what I at least am reading on the boards" How many boards do you follow on a daily basis? It isn't just the boards that count. Lots of the the information to be found on the boards is totally unreliable as most of us are aware. One never knows what is reliable and what is not except through experience and one's own knowledge of the law.

I follow over 400 different information sources daily. Not just message boards but blogs as well. I can get through all of them several times a day picking up on the latest quite easily. Most of what I follow are decisions from higher courts from the Supremes on down to lower level state supreme courts and appellate courts. I also follow large numbers of professional blogs that deal with various aspects of law. Most of them are either debt collection attorneys or consumer advocacy attorneys but some are also in the real estate and mortgage foreclosure areas.

One I like a lot is Neil Garfield's livinglies blog. He is into mortgage fraud issues and comes up with some really good stuff. While some might think that keeping up with the latest on over 400 different sources sounds impossible it really isn't at all. I use a free program called Mozilla Thunderbird. It can keep up with a multitude of email headlines format so it is no problem telling what is new and what the new stuff is all about. For those who may not know, Thunderbird is put out by the same people who put out the Firefox browser so it is free, easy to find, download and put to good use. I understand there are other similar programs out there that do about the same thing. The real key is getting to know about RSS and how to use it but there isn't anything hard or technical about it. Its easy to learn and you certainly don't have to be a rocket scientist to pick up on the basics quickly.

Thunderbird isn't hard to use either once you get the hang of it.

I don't know either, but simply most times the original mortgagor is generally within the same state as the mortgagee (I would think), and it would probably make more sense to use the laws of the state the property is in...

I only follow a couple. The reality is, I'm here for the giving back what was given to me more so, than really digging deep into the laws. If someone were to have a situation where choice of law might be applicable - my response would be to go research it (and find out for themselves). I know I've seen some case cites, but I was trying to cut you off at the pass because I don't know what they are :D, so I wrote a general message.

While it can be true that the original lender is within the same state in which the property is located that is not generally true at all. If it were we would not be in the position we are in over the $700 billion bailout. That would not have occurred.

The reality is that the large lenders never had anywhere near the amount of money involved in buying all those houses all across America to begin with. The large lenders actually never had a penny invested in any property. They started off buying a few houses and immediately sold the notes to a 3rd party and usually did so within a few days if not a few hours after the notes were signed. That third party then sorted out the notes into bundles of notes which were comprised of borrowers with varying FICO scores. Borrowers with very high FICO scores went into an A pool or category of investment vehicles and those with lower FICO scores went into other grades of investment vehicles. They were graded into 4 or more different categories, A, B, C, D and of course the D grade vehicles were the sub-prime notes. Definitely considered to be high risk investments. Then these bundles of notes were sold on the securities markets to investors world wide. Each investor bought tranches and no single investor ever had enough money invested to own an entire bundle. So all they had were what is known as tranches or pieces of any given pie or bundle. The mortgage companies were horribly over leveraged to the point where they actually owed as much as 30 or 40 times their capitalization to the mortgage pool. There was no problem with that until the economy turned sour and the default rates began to climb dramatically.

In the event that one or more homeowners defaulted there was no real problem because the defaulted note would simply be replaced with a new productive one and nobody would ever be the wiser but when the market began to turn sour and people stopped buying homes on the same scale as before and at the same time defaults also began to skyrocket due to the economy then all hell broke loose on them. The government had to step in with the bailout package but in the end even the government didn't have enough resources to pull it off so the central banks have had to step in and help the government fund the bail out.

If they had not done that the credibility of our own government would have went to pot as well and their ability to borrow to cover government expenses would have deteriorated to the point that our government would have defaulted on it's obligations. That could not be allowed to happen so the central banks stepped in with a promise of unlimited funding and support.

So, as a result very few mortgaged homes have a single creditor. At the time the original lender sells the note then the note and the mortgage become separated and the note becomes unsecured by any real property. At least that is a theory which is being tested in some courts today. If that be true then there is no possible way that a home could be foreclosed on because the mortgage and note are supposedly separated by the fact of the sale of the note to the securities market where no single lender exists. As a result, a few judges in a few courts are demanding that the plaintiff produce the actual note in court or they will not sanction a foreclosure. I've personally seen that happen in two separate cases. Both demanded to see the actual note and the judge told the lawyer that if they did not have the note then no foreclosure could take place.

This whole mess didn't just happen because the economy and the housing markets went sour. It actually started back about 1970 when the Levi jeans factory in El Paso, Texas was allowed to set up it's factory across the border in Juarez, Mexico. Soon other companies started to follow suit and NAFTA was born. The mass migration of American companies to Mexico and other foreign nations causing the loss of American jobs was what actually started the chain reaction leading to the mess we are in today and it will get much worse before it is over.

The stock markets are going down almost every day, often by 400 or more points. A short time ago it was over 11,000 on the DOW and as I write it is ready to drop below the 8,000 mark. Some market experts are predicting that it will drop to around 5 to 7,000 before it starts to rebound but I know of nothing that would keep it from dropping much lower than that.

We are in for a recession the likes of which the world has never known. That seems obvious.

That would be a "Greater Depression" which I believe the world can avoid if they keep their heads and concentrate on damage control and on measures to prevent a future recurrence. As Bernanke said, you can solve a lot of problems with a printing press...

__________________
_________

"No one would have believed ... that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than Man's ... Yet across the gulf of space ... intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic ... regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly but surely drew their plans against us." - H.G. Wells, The War of The Worlds, describing how Martian JDBs think about Earthling debtors

Incorporate or form an LLC in Florida

That has been tried many times before in history and has always fai led. Yes, governments can run the printing presses. No problem there but the result is always inflation. A good indication of what running the presses does is the fact that this year beneficiaries of government pensions will receive the highest increase in their pensions due to cost of living expense increases that they have received in 27 years. The current projection is that the increase will be 10 percent. Normally their increases run between 1 and 3 percent. Most of that seems to be due to increases in food and energy costs. So that increase will put an even heavier burden on the government coffers.

Government cannot cure the problems simply by running the presses. We have overspent ourselves now to the point of no return as it is. Just as we cannot drill our way out of the energy situation we can't print our way out of the monetary crises.

A nation is in fact no different than it's citizens because all wealth has its limits. If a citizen spends himself deeply into debt he must stop spending sooner or later and either pay up or face bankruptcy. Government is no different. The only way government can increase its funding is through taxation and in order to support taxation people have to be making money. Our unemployment rate is also increasing drastically. Unemployed people do not pay taxes. They just consume increasing the costs of government.

We must put our people back to work and do it quickly. We are facing a huge problem there too because our population is growing older every year with fewer and fewer new babies being born to replace them in the workforce. Once the average age of the general population reaches a certain point a nation can no longer produce enough offspring to sustain itself. It is said that we have already reached the point of no return on that score too.