Borrowers required to pay up to protect lenders

(Flickr photo by cbcd04)

Borrowing funds to finance a home purchase goes way beyond monthly payments.

The process is analogous to death by a thousand cuts.

First, you have to pay an application fee.  In other words, the money that the lender makes by charging loan interest just isn’t sufficient to cover the costs of assuring that you’ll make monthly payments on time.  (We know how well those procedures worked looking at the number of loan defaults in recent years.)

Then you fork over money for the lender to check your credit.

Let’s not forget