If you are a reporter and HAVE read the story link above, I would like to suggest that researching financial information regarding homeowners that take such drastic measures as murder suicide and burning down their own home should be part of your research.
Did the bank foreclose when the home may have still had equity left in it? Might either a re-fi or reverse mortgage allowed the couple to get by on SS plus the reverse mortgage? Was the wife collecting SS and the husband just two years away from collecting SS himself and allowing them a reverse mortgage or simply to raise the home equity line of credit would have allowed them to buy the time they needed?
A husband caretaking for a cancer stricken wife cannot work and take care of his wife. Why does our government, that was so big on healthcare reform, continue to ignore caretakers who do the right thing and take care of their own cancer stricken family?
Caretaking for a cancer stricken family member is a full time, unpaid job, meaning the husband COULD NOT WORK. The husband would not be allowed to request a home equity line increase out of the home even if equity was there, because the homeowner is not employed.
So it is possible that the banksters unwillingness to allow any nest egg money sitting in the home to be taken out just galled this despondent homeowner so much that he was not going to allow a bankster to steal what he had put into the home via a premature foreclosure.
Basically, banks have set the HELOC worst case scenario threshold at around 60-65% of the value of a paid off home. If the home is not paid off, the HELOC may still be around 65% the value of what has been paid down off of the value of the home. The idea being that if the home is foreclosed and resold, the banks should break even at worse even if the homeowner maxed out their HELOC.
But in the past two years, banks have clamped down on HELOC's above and beyond their own safety threshold, resulting in class action lawsuits against them.
If there had been any remaining equity in the burned down home before it was burned down, it could have bought this couple the time they needed to plan for the next couple of years. I bring the home equity issue up because I could see a man burning down his own home so the banksters don't get the sweat and equity he put into the home over the prior 10 years that the banksters are not allowing him to access.
It is simplistic to state that the man committed murderer suicide because of foreclosure IF the facts present themselves that this was an UNFAIR FORECLOSURE.
One could say, well, if the banks had given the homeowner a higher home equity line of credit, he would just burned the house down when that additional money ran out. Not necessarily true. If the homeowner, in his heart knows that he has tapped the home of all that is reasonable to tap, he might not wait until the last minute and use the last 10 or 20 grand to move out of the home voluntarily and use that savings to tide them over until SS kicks in.
But without any available equity, this particular homeowner may have been literally trapped with no options, specifically because of his cancer stricken wife.
Is it possible that the banks DON'T CARE that the homeowner burned down his own home? If I were an insurance company about to pay the bank a claim because of the fire, I would consider denying the claim if the bank did not allow the homeowner access to legitimate home equity built up in the home, and give Bank induced stress as the cause of the fire.
But it's not just the banksters, it's Barack Obama's administration showboating the "success" of their health care legislation while ignoring the plight of the cancer stricken homeowner or family member that reduces the homeowner's ability to work that I am finding to be inconsistent, and deadly to honorable family trying to do the right thing and caretake a cancer stricken family member.
