Free Bank with Every Exotic Mortgage! Act Now!

$12,000 sounds like the monthly mortgage bill for a movie star's mansion.

Actually that's what the Martinez family of Mountain House, California will pay every month for their house in 2015, if they're still living there.

They bought the house in 2005 with an interest only loan for $630,000. In the last few years property values went down, and the house is now worth 420k, so refinancing is out of the picture.

According to the piece in the NYT, the Martinezes are not alone -- 90% of people in Mountain House -- the entire 95391 zip code in fact -- owe more on their houses than what they are worth.

My guess is that if these folks had 30-year fixed mortgages, they wouldn't be as worried. But instead, it sounds like they chose exotic mortgage products that deferred large amounts of their payments, which they now can't pay.

I can only draw one conclusion from that mess, and it goes back to what my dad told me 30 years ago when I was 8. "When you owe the bank 1o,000 dollars, the bank owns you," he said. "But when you owe the bank 10 million dollars, you own the bank."

Now that the residents of Mountain House and others like them own all the banks in America, I wonder what they will do with them....