I may not be the world’s biggest Obama fan but the latest news stories about him getting a “discount” on a new home is absolutely ridiculous. Can’t they do any better than this?
Obama Got Discount on Home Loan - washingtonpost.com
The freshman Democratic senator received a discount. He locked in an interest rate of 5.625 percent on the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, below the average for such loans at the time in Chicago. The loan was unusually large, known in banker lingo as a “super super jumbo.” Obama paid no origination fee or discount points, as some consumers do to reduce their interest rates.
Two pages of this tripe in the article no less with all sorts of “OMG” type statements that mean absolutely nothing at all except this; the guy got a fair deal, that’s all.
The going rate at the time was around 5.94 percent which means his so called “discount” was a mind boggling .315 percent which saved him about $300,000 on a 1.65 million dollar house. They even managed to drag Tony Rezko back into the picture by bringing up the point that his wife had bought the adjacent property for $625,000 then sold a portion of the the underdeveloped property to the Obama’s to increase their yard space–oh, heavens to Betsy, the guy’s obviously on the make.
This is not news.
Hell, I did better than that when I bought my house down on the south shore of CT years ago. I locked in a fixed interest rate better than 2 percent lower than the going rate and a paid significantly less than the asking price along with absolutely no closing costs while I was at it. Sure, my place wasn’t a 1.65 million dollar restored Georgian mansion but then again I didn’t have a 2 million dollar book deal going either. No one actually offered to increase my yard space by selling part of theirs but I already had a good size yard anyway so who needed it? Just more to mow is the way I look at it.
If this is the best the media can do to dig up dirt on Obama then someone’s slacking, he hides it better than any politician in history or maybe there’s just not that much to dig up after all. Either way, this is about as newsworthy as me buying my house in CT was.
Of course it did make me write up a post about it didn’t it?
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