Dodd-Frank Strikes the Price Household

Ok, so get this. Dodd-Frank has struck, and it has done what Democrats always do... it has f*cked the Price household all in the name of saving the Big Banks! Figures.

Perhaps you recall the Great Recession. It was triggered when liberals decided that mortgage companies should hand out homes to people who were less trustworthy than foreign ministers from Nigeria who want to park $42 million in your bank account. The Big Banks bought these mortgages like a fat kids buys donuts. Then, incredibly things went wrong. I personally think it all went wrong when Congress re-classified stock options to basically make all those stock options handed out by silicon valley worthless, but that's neither here nor there. Things went wrong, let's put it that way.

Soon, home values collapsed and everyone in California defaulted. One giant Bank (Lehman Brothers) was sacrificed to the Gods of Expediency, and everyone else got bailed out out of my f*cking pocket. Yours too, sunshine.

Suddenly, everyone knew the words Too Big To Fail. This meant that these banks had gotten too large and had become a danger because if they failed, the economy would tank. Hence, the banks needed to get smaller.

Enter the Democrats with a super-majority. Sen. Chris Dodd, who was a whore, and Sen. Barney Frank, who was a different kind of whore, came to the rescue with Dodd-Frank. The Democrats even bragged about it at the time. Did it work? Of course not because Democratic solutions never do.

Over the next few years, the Big Bangs kept growing. They ate up smaller banks who couldn't navigate the insider briar-patch created by Dodd-Frank and went from Too Big To Fail to WAY TOO BIG TO FAIL to HOLY SH*T THEY'RE TOO BIG TO FAIL! Democratic solutions at work, my friends. To protect us from the Big Banks, they passed regulations that wiped out large numbers of small banks and made them chum for a Big Bank feeding frenzy. Nice work, dumbasses.

Anyways, I have run into another way in which Dodd-Frank seeks to save the big banks. Get this...

I'm trying to refinance and roll some non-deductible debt into my mortgage. Doing so could save me a lot of money and make my finances much better. I am an ideal candidate as well. Both my wife and I pretty nearly have perfect credit. My report notes "26 years never late" in terms of payments. I can cover all the closing costs in cash. Our house has even shot up in value since we bought it.

So we applied. Everything was going well. Then they got an appraisal. The appraiser screwed us. For reasons that are unclear, the bastard low-balled us and then some. Two houses on our street sold last month for the amount we claimed as the value of our house. He ignored those and went with three homes clustered in another part of the development a mile away where homes sell for $60,000 less than this part. Wow. (BTW, a mile in the other direction, homes are $60,000 more than ours.)

No problem though, right? We just get another appraisal, right? Nope.

Dodd-Frank has changed the rules. The mortgage company is limited by law to giving us no more than 80% of the value of the house. They did not get to choose the appraiser. They are not allowed to challenge the appraisal. They can't even ask the appraiser to change his mind. They can only... by law... ask the appraiser questions and "hope that he reads between the lines." If he does nothing, then he does nothing. We are done. They can't even order a second appraisal. Actually, they can (at $500 a pop), but federal law requires them to go with the lowest appraisal, so what's the point?

So to save Goldman Sachs from buying the mortgages of Nigerians scammers, I am unable to refinance a home I already own because one *sshole appraiser decided to low-ball me in a way that is obviously false. I will probably file a complaint against the guy with his licensing agency, but how does that help me? Thank you Dodd-Frank... thank you Democrats. Your solutions suck.