In peace and science, social justice and medicine, things have never been better.
How do we sound smart with zero effort? Well we don't want to be gullible (everything is good and fair!) so we do the opposite (everything is corrupt and bad!).
I really wish it were more than that.
Saying something like "Amazon is good" well, that's an opinion, definitely grey. Saying "This is exactly 1 inch", well, it probably isn't and the more you care about it's accuracy, the harder it is to measure. Most things are like that. Clear cut at first, and increasingly more difficult the more precise you go. The devil is in the details.
So, yes, if the only options are black and white, the answers are generally easy, you've got a 50% chance of being wrong. As soon as you blur the line, you're basically wrong all the time. The goal is to be less wrong, and to improve, make progress.
Some of the larger lenders may not have this flexibility.
If only 1% of the population actually votes, elected representatives will tend to represent that 1%. If you cede the centre ground you get extremists.
Say what you like about Trump, he managed to get his target demographic fired up and out to vote. $boring_reasonable_politician doesn't have the same ability by their nature to get people fired up, but we still need to vote for them.
Not voting is not a solution.
If what Trump did last election was getting them fired up, then this election they are going nuclear. Check out the massive waves of people at his rallies versus the trickles at the Dem's gatherings.
1) They didn't follow company procedure of which big banks insist employees follow otherwise the employees risk 'liability for not picking the 3 credit agencies'. Or
2) They lied and followed company procedure, and not tell you the outcome from them.
3) Your lender probably passed the request and got 1) or 2) later in the chain.
4) They insist they have to use Equifax, lose the deal, and note why in their records.
You can log reasons for bad business outcomes all day long, millions and millions, and it won’t change corporate behavior.
For instance, it might suggest that championing a grassroots boycott effort is a waste of time, and that perhaps putting that effort to lobby for laws by which these types of privacy breaches result in automatic prison time or high personal fines is a better option? Also not likely to succeed, but perhaps much more likely than asking rando consumers to not defect in their personal prisoner’s dilemma game with an unmoving corporate behemoth.
That outcome is academic, as the parent specifically said it wasn't an issue.
you realize you can say the wildest most unsophisticated things and they’ll just punch the numbers into a machine and get a “lend to this guy or not” result either way right?
I get that they win compared to those who use more labor, but still some details would be nice :)
Manual underwriting is the same thing, only it's a person doing the same thing, and you can talk a person around.
Why might you need to do that? Well, I bought a rental building after I bought my primary residence, and I intended to move into the top unit in the building. Automated underwriting failed that because "primary home with more bedrooms and bathrooms" is "better" than "apartment in rental building" according to automated underwriting.
Since my lender also had manual underwriting, I was able to explain my situation to them, and why an apartment was preferable (I still don't understand why "I'll live there for a year to keep an eye on my investment" wasn't enough reason. They openly acknowledged that it was the superior way to do it, but it didn't move the needle on the formula)
Heck, Google built a billion-dollar business on making sure interfacing with wetware is a write-only process.
Mortgage portfolio performs best when its different portions match the exact specs of the models used to model the portfolio.
That basically means "plug in the numbers and receive an answer". That's automated underwriting. It is done pretty much exclusively for conforming loans: specific LTV, specific DTI of the borrowers, specific ranges of credit scores, specific amounts, specific points.
Manual underwriting is "In a view of a loan officer this mortgage should be ok".
People think that when they go to get a loan in a bank and sit down with a manager or a loan officer, they are getting manual underwriting. It is rarely the case -- most of the people on the other side just type in the answers into the software and it spits out the answer. That's what the likes of quickenloans and lending tree optimize and market.
Manual underwriting can be something like engineer #10 of WeWork shows up at a bank today and say "So, I want to buy that house for $5 million, and when We goes public I am going to be worth about 80mil, plus I still make my $250k a year". Most of the banks cannot handle this even though anyone with a brain should say 'Hmm... if he pledges all of the shares he currently owns plus all of his options and if he can get us in writing company's agreement that he can do that then we should totally loan him the money because his current holdings are worth $10m, he is borrowing $5m, and there are options that he should be able to exercise and he only has $80k in debt and his credit score is 675, so it seems he is ok. He is definitely a safer bet than that guy putting 25% down who will have only 10k in assets left after the first payment on a $2m loan we are giving. So if we are going to give a loan to the $2m guy, we should definitely give a loan to the WeWork engineer if he pledges his shares"
So there's an entire industry that exists which charges money for this "underwriting" when in reality it just sends the applications to a few banks that do it. But lots of people think that a mortgage broker can get them a better than deal a primary lender bank because of all the marketing. Those are the people that "won't pull Equifax because you asked"
I wanted the sign-up bonus. $800 of free money was too much to pass up in my financial situation.
This is the kind of situation where I think some regulation would help, e.g. federal law should allow me to decide which of the credit agencies they use.
The problem with boycotting Equifax is I also want to boycott Experian. And in the future, maybe TransUnion will have a major issue, who knows.
Is the bank going to be cool with me boycotting the 2 biggest of them, or even all 3? Obviously not, so let's not pretend that consumer choice is a real way out of this mess.
Equifax has a poor reputation from the leak in addition to having an antisocial business model, so they are the most vulnerable.
That could at the very least give the customers leverage to negotiate the rates down, which would also hurt Equifax’s revenue stream.
Its an objective acceptance of reality.
Typically I like to know which lenders check which score, so that I can strategically drop a hard inquiry on a particular reporting agency’s score, I use the multiple scores as a currency for maximum amounts of hard inquiries, as a hard inquiry temporarily lowers the score decreasing chances of approval or favorable lending terms. Once I hit two or three on Equifax, I will only apply with lenders that hit Transunion scores, etc. When the approvals go through my unutilized credit has increased so much that it has raised my scores more than the inquiries dropped them. When I actually go to apply for a mortgage I would be considered the most credit worthy borrower and save hundreds of thousands in interest payments.
I really don’t care about this crusade.
They are a horrible company that needs to go out of business. Make their customers feel embarrassed to be doing business with them.