Jeff Gray is a nice guy. He's a 45 year old father of three, a husband to a school teacher and a former Marine. He is also self-admittedly financially inept and very-near being kicked out of his suburban Maryland home. He is literally begging for help not to be foreclosed on. But when you hear his short financial history, you may come to the same conclusion that J.P. Morgan Chase has come to: Jeff Gray can not keep his home.
I sat in his living room a few weeks back and went through his mortgage papers and could not believe what I was reading. In 2005, Jeff Gray filed a tax return indicating he and his wife had a combined income of $7,900 a year. In December of that same year the couple refinanced their three bedroom home for $347,000. It would take four months of his salary to pay for just one month of his mortgage.
When I asked him how anyone ever approved this loan, he told me to look at the loan papers that he says were filled out by a fast talking mortgage broker. The loan form indicated Jeff and his wife were making more than $13,000 a month!
"Wait a minute",
I said "Your income was 7-thousand-900 a year and they inflated it on the paperwork to $13,000-a-month, and somehow they loaned you 347 thousand?"
"Yep."
"Jeff, I have to ask you did that make sense to you at the time?"
"Well Drew, when I went back and looked at it, like I said we were signing deeds we were getting them real fast, and we didn't know. We didn't pay any attention to it."
Jeff Gray has not made a mortgage payment, he says, in four years. He has been living rent free, unable to pay that $2,700-a-month for even one month. Now he wants help.
There are a lot of reasons we have gotten into this housing mess. Whomever it was who wrote this loan, approved this loan and sold this loan should, in my view, be held responsible for it. But that also includes the person who applied for the loan, signed for the loan and then couldn't pay the loan.
Jeff Gray told me he feels he was swindled, caught up in a swirl of paper work flying at him at closing. And it is true he is being kicked out while the banks are being bailed out. But there is no fine print about the loan papers I saw. They clearly stated his first mortgage payment would be $2,700 dollars and he knew he couldn't afford it.
Filed under: Drew Griffin Uncategorized