Isn't it ironic that

[Colonel_here]

Hi,
You mean a financial adviser other than the loan officer making the loan? Because, of course, you *must* assume the loan officer is out to screw you. But how do you know that you can trust the financial adviser? Perhaps he is an idiot who understands the whole mortgage mess no better than you do. And, other than having one for an uncle, how do you go about getting a financial adviser?

Number one in North America financial advisors could be sued for malpractice just like dentists, and doctors. Mortgage brokers, stock brokers can't be. So if they get you in the situation by misunderstanding your needs and misleading you you can sue them, often just by filling a complaint through their licensing agency, it will do most of the job after that.
Now to get a financial advisor just pick up phone directory and see financial planning section. You will find both independents and the ones working under major companies. I know the ones in Canada are:
Investors Group
Manulife Financial Group
Sunlife Financial
all major banks have financial planning departments but often they are more limited than the other ones.
I am sure that US has such companies. I think Fidelity does financial planning in US and Sunlife Financial is present in US.

And 'thinking things through', while a nice concept, suffers from the realiy of the inability of the average person to make correct change, much less work out a detailed budget for the next twenty or so years.

That is why there are accountants and financial planers are around.

There's enough blame to go around. Maybe the greedy SOBs who saw a way to make a killing by abandoning the ethics of bankers don't deserve all the blame, but 'caveat emptor' is not the whole answer, either.
--Pete

The problem with US that mortgage brokers did not have any ethics to fall down to. They just like a store. You come in and buy a plasma TV is the salesperson in the store will ask you if you can afford to put that TV on a credit card or whether it will fit on your wall. No. People came to the mortgage broker and asked for cheapest mortgage and he provided that.

Of course, if the advisor is paid by the number of loans he manages to get signed, as has just been revealed to be the case in a couple of banks here, things do change a bit. The customer should still be critical, but few people will be alarmed (or even find cause to go over the numbers), if their bank advisor tells them everything is ok.

True, that people do no check through things but it is their fault for doing that, they should we are taught to read everything before we sign. I do literally that and ask questions untill it is crystal clear before I sign the contracts it drives the person on the other side crazy but so what it is my money and I deserve to know what is being done to it.

"All of it is predicated on the idea that the value of the property will remain flat or increase. The housing price bubble resulted in loans being written for well over the actual value of the property. Massive foreclosures have snow-balled putting more properties into an already glutted market further reducing the housing values. This is also why AIG, the world largest Mortgage insurer is in trouble. Mortgage banks, and mortgage derivitive securities have policies with AIG that protect some of their portfolios from mortgage values on bad debt decreasing."
Well the easy lending usually drives the prices of houses up and people when see prices of housing go up usually buy. The smart people usually offload their houses and move to rent because rent usually drops and quality of it increases. When the prices take a dive as they did they start buying the houses back and wait until the next house boom starts to sell it (actual strategy of a real estate speculator I know). He now adopted it to do it across borders.

"Actually, the poor CONSUMER is not really the idiot here. They came with nothing, and walk away with nothing. Anyone with a nest egg could lose it all. I have a good friend who lost his house because he refinanced to an ARM that went up, and then when his wife had an illness, they lost her supplemental income, and they couldn't keep up with payments on their debt load. Many people live only a few paychecks away from financial crisis. The next insolvency will be State governments who will be unable to cope with the spike in demand for unemployment, and services for the newly poor."
Well in the case above mentioned once again if your friend would have went to financial adviser they most likely would have got disability insurance or critical illness insurance that would have provided for that situation and if their financial advisor never mentioned it I believe they can sue him for malpractice.