Lenders try to help homeowners in trouble but is it too little, too late?

As foreclosure numbers break records, politicians and banks scramble for a solution.

Banks are helping a broader array of homeowners struggling with their loan payments, but the sheer number of bad loans is overshadowing their efforts.

Experts say lenders and loan servicers are now willing to work with financially strapped borrowers even if they are current on their loans. During the housing boom, banks generally modified home loans only after borrowers missed at least one payment and thus dinged their credit, sources said.

One reason banks have changed their tune: record foreclosures.

Credit counselor Lohrenz said after years of working with people with credit problems her thinking has shifted on government intervention in the housing market.

"I personally feel the bottom line is we can't bail out all these people," Lohrenz said. "Then you just have the same problems again. I think we have to let them fail for the market to correct itself. I know there is a lot of pain in people's lives, and we do what we can."

But others disagree.

Kurt Eggert, a law professor at Chapman University who has followed the mortgage industry, said government needs to find a way to mandate loan modifications.

"The challenge is to figure out what the leverage should be," Eggert said.

One possibility would be to revive a previously rejected congressional plan that would allow bankruptcy court judges to order loan modifications. That would motivate loan servicers to work with borrowers to avoid the borrower filing bankruptcy, he said.

"The purpose of loan modifications is too mitigate losses to the investor by keeping the borrower in the home," Eggert said. "It's not like it's charity to the borrower."

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More thoughts on job hopping...

Job hopping's become a norm for younger workers (particularly millennials). Is this a passing trend or the future of the workplace?

Here are some more thoughts from Lynne Sarikas, director of the MBA Career Center at Northeastern University's College of Business Administration:

The latest figure I heard was that people have on average 7 different jobs over the course of their careers and I suspect that will increase. Not only do workers switch jobs on their own more often these days, companies don't keep employees for life either with downsizing, restructuring, mergers, acquisitions etc.

It is unfair to claim this is a phenomenon unique to the millenials. While the baby boomers tended to have careers for life, most people in the workforce today have not stayed with the same company for their entire careers. It is unusual to see a resume with a single employer. The trick is to have a story to tell about the changes. Why did you make each move, what experience did you gain from each, how do the combined experiences best prepare you for the next step? No one should be going in to an interview apologizing for having had multiple jobs.

The companies that tend to retain employees for significant periods of time tend to be the very large companies and they are successful in retaining the employees the really want by offering them regularly opportunities to grow and change. While someone may work at a Raytheon or IBM for more than 25 years, they frequently never have the same job for more than two years. Large companies have enough diversity of opportunities to keep people moving and growing.

While employers will still claim to look for stability when recruiting, they are truly looking for the best skill set and fit for their culture regardless of whether that skill set was built in a single company or a series of different companies. There is value in demonstrating the ability to learn a new company or industry. There is value in demonstrating the ability to work in organizations of different size and styles.

The job search is really a sales job and that means doing your best to sell your unique set of skills and experience regardless of how you acquired them. Focus on what the employer is looking for and sell your advantages regardless of how many employers you have on your resume. Just be prepared to explain why you made the changes, and how you gained valuable experience from each that prepares you for this new opportunity.

Human beings are learning beings - as long as you learn something from the experience and can demonstrate that, it has value. Obviously one should avoid the extreme of jumping from one to job to the next too quickly. It is helpful to show some progression and promotion within an organization but offer the big jump in responsibilities comes by changing companies.

It will be interesting to watch the millenials to make sure they aren't changing jobs every time their attention span wanes!!

4 Ways to Burn Out, Effort-Free

Bored? Dissatisfied? Disinterested? You're well on your way to burning out!

By Liz Wolgemuth

Job burnout: The phrase might conjure up images of work-obsessed lawyers sneakily checking their BlackBerrys from the front row of their kids' elementary school plays or from the sidelines of their soccer games. But it should probably also bring to mind images of desk drones mindlessly filling out spreadsheets, preparing TPS reports, and shooting spitballs toward the ceiling. Indeed, the state of being perpetually underworked may be about as exhaustion-inducing as that of always having more work than you can handle.

Work at home or communicate only through E-mail and IM. The more time you can spend in mind-numbing isolation, poking at your keyboard and reading through your spam folder, the better to reach a state of burnout. Indeed, isolating work can contribute to employee drinking, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

A sense of being isolated comes when solitary workers are not getting necessary support from supervisors and peers, says Jay Mulki, an assistant professor at Northeastern University's College of Business Administration who has studied workplace isolation among telecommuters and office workers. "That leads to stress in the sense that a person feels that he's not visible, nobody cares about him, his achievements are not known, nobody cares about whether he has done his work or not," Mulki says. "And he also feels that, most of the time, somebody may feel that he is goofing off."

Physical distance contributes to the sense of being isolated, but even employees who work elbow-to-elbow with others can experience the lonely sensation, Mulki says. It can happen if coworkers communicate solely through E-mail or instant messaging, or if a job requires such constant tasking—as with call-center employees—that it allows no time for connecting.

To combat isolation, employees need to make a point of talking about their accomplishments regularly with their supervisor. Telecommuters can seek out local mentors or find other nearby telecommuters to occasionally share their work space, Mulki says.

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IBM Hops on Web Syndication Bandwagon

IBM joins Microsoft, Cisco, Symantec and other heavyweights in offering Web Syndication services to channel partners.

The last thing VARs, especially smaller shops like Lighthouse Computer Services, want to spend time on is updating information and listings of hundreds, even thousands, of vendor products on their Web sites.

Considering the sheer number of product lines, products and cross-brand solutions IBM offers, Sylvestre says that task was nearly impossible.

One alternative was to redirect customers to the IBM site, but that quickly put an end to the customers' interaction with the Lighthouse site, Sylvestre says. The WebCollage Web Syndication tool keeps customers and prospects within the Lighthouse site, and automatically updates the site with accurate information about products and solutions, he says.

IBM joins heavyweights Microsoft, Symantec and Cisco, among others, in offering the Web syndication services to its channel partners. The syndication services, powered by Web Collage, are a no-brainer: Syndication services can automatically feed VARs' Web sites with accurate, up-to-date information about vendors' products.

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Subprime problem: branding much larger crisis?

Kurt Eggert, a law professor who has testified to Congress on these issues and is a past member of the Federal Reserve Board's Consumer Advisory Council, recently provided some thoughts on the following question: Is "subprime" becoming a form of branding a crisis that actually is larger than the global uncertainty stemming from sales of bundled American mortgages in the residual market?

“The credit crunch is outstripping the subprime market and the subprime crisis if anything reveals that lenders weren't doing good risk assessment. Now, the entire market is much more wary of risk and unwilling to make loans without being able to determine the risk characteristics of the borrower,” Prof. Eggert points out. “Given that much of the subprime risk out there is not transparent, is hidden away in complex structured entities that are difficult to price, this is causing the credit crunch we've seen out there.”

“As to banks writing down their other loans, banks should be writing down loans that have gone bad and if they don't, if they try to conceal the reduced value of these loans, this can cause broader harm as again other parties become suspicious of the true value of their holdings,” Prof. Eggert adds. “So, we should be encouraging both banks and rating agencies to be writing down loans and ratings of securities backed by loans as those go bad.”

Below is Prof. Eggert's bio.

Professor Kurt Eggert is a Professor of Law and Director of Clinical Legal Education. He also runs Chapman's Alona Cortese Elder Law Center, and teaches both clinical and doctrinal classes. His scholarship has focused on several different areas, among them predatory lending, consumer credit, gambling regulation, and elder abuse. He has testified to Congress on predatory lending issues and is a member of the Federal Reserve Board's Consumer Advisory Council, where he chairs the subcommittee on Consumer Credit. Previously, he was an adjunct professor of law, teaching Elder Law, at Loyola Law School. From 1990 until 1999, he was a senior attorney at Bet Tzedek Legal Services in Los Angeles, where he specialized in complex litigation, including consumer fraud and home equity fraud. Professor Eggert received his B.A. from Rice University, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and received his Juris Doctor from Boalt Hall, the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. He teaches Legal and Equitable Remedies, Elder Law, Legal Research and Writing, Civil Procedure and Depositions/Discovery Complex Litigation.

Telecommuters: Invisible workers?

Those who work from home struggle with isolation. But few would give up the arrangement.

By Marilyn Gardner Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the May 12, 2008 edition

During the six months that Allison Brinkman worked at home as a public relations manager, she savored the advantages.

"I didn't have to dress up, fight traffic, or worry about paying for doggie day care," she says.
But she found disadvantages, too. "I missed the social aspect of being part of a team and developing a rapport with colleagues," says Ms. Brinkman, who works with Eisen Management Group in Cincinnati.

As the ranks of telecommuters grow – pushed by soaring gasoline prices – some in the work-from-home crowd point to disadvantages surrounding what many office-bound workers might assume is the ultimate deal.

A feeling of isolation counts as the biggest challenge many of them face, says Jay Malki, marketing professor at Northeastern University in Boston. He conducted a study for IBM, where more than 40 percent of workers do not come into the office every day.

Remote workers also express concerns that they are invisible and their work is not being recognized. "Isolation happens when telecommuters can't get the support they need," Professor Malki says. "When face-to-face communication isn't possible, workers need a substitute – and voice mail isn't it."

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The Benefits of Plugging a Big Company's Products

Appearing in Ads Gives Small Firms MarketingWithout Any Costs
By RAYMUND FLANDEZMay 8, 2007; Page B9

In mid-February, Verizon Communications Inc. emailed its small-business customers in Philadelphia to ask if they would like to be featured in a radio ad campaign. In 48 hours, the telecom giant received 25 emails.

One came from Jill Gizzio, founder of DogToys.com, a Web retailer and wholesaler of pet products based in West Chester, Pa. Last month, her story -- that of a seven-employee business that has used Verizon's broadband technology for the past 10 years -- was showcased with two other local entrepreneurs in a regional promotion that brought significant attention to her tiny company.

"It was the easiest thing I've ever done" in terms of marketing DogToys.com, says the 50-year-old Ms. Gizzio.

Companies that provide products and services directly to small businesses, such as banks, credit-card companies and package-delivery firms, have for years used ads featuring entrepreneurs. But other big companies are increasingly realizing that using real people with real businesses in their ad campaigns lends credibility to their efforts and provides a cheap and effective way to target niche audiences -- be it the African-American, Latino or other communities, environmentally conscious consumers or even pet enthusiasts.

For their part, small businesses featured in these ads get the kind of marketing and recognition that might take them years to get on their own. And they do so with very little effort and on someone else's tab.

The one thing small businesses have to be willing to do, of course, is promote somebody else's product. Gloria Barczak, marketing professor at Northeastern University in Boston, says small-business owners want to be careful not to appear in ads in which the sponsor company may be going through a difficult time or whose image doesn't fit with the one they're trying to create.

"You want to be connected with brands that are saying something similar to what you're trying to say," Ms. Barczak says.

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