Chris Arnold
speaker
152 appearances
10 recordings
4 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 4 Apr
Chris Arnold’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 3.
Appearances
Why did you blow up the one affordable option for veterans to start repaying their mortgage?
Now, the VA did seem to know there was a problem, to be fair. They said that they were working on a new on-ramp, if you will, a new way for people to start repaying again by sort of resetting the mortgage to a super low interest rate. But... The VA admitted to Chris and Quill that whole thing wasn't going to be ready for months.
Chris and Quill go back to Ray Queen, explain all of this. And Ray is like, well, if the fix is coming, don't foreclose on us. Like give the fire trucks time to show up.
Chris and Quill go back to the VA, manage to get a sit-down interview with the person in charge of the VA loan program, John Bell, and just tell him what Ray said.
In other words, still no help for Ray and Becky and any other veterans about to lose their houses. So this time, Chris goes to the airwaves.
Chris puts all of this reporting into a story, includes the Queens.
And and this is where things really start to kind of blow up.
Uh-huh. WTF, your own language there, I assume, not the senatorial.
Chris and Quill would later call up one of those senators, Montana Democrat John Tester.
Tester is chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. So, you know, he's in charge of the committee that oversees the VA.
So, yeah, this angry letter from Tester and the other senators went off to the VA. And then by the end of the week...
Chris called the Queens before news about the foreclosure moratorium had gotten out.
Okay. It's been a year since that phone call. After the break... Everything is fixed. No. No. No way. No, it's not.
Not fixed. So a foreclosure pause is useful, but the whole point of that was to buy time for the Department of Veterans Affairs to roll out this permanent fix, this program that it was calling VASP.
Let's call it the bailout plan. Good plan. So, the bailout plan. If you are a veteran who is facing foreclosure, the VA will go to the bank or more likely the investors who hold your mortgage, and they will take the mortgage back from them.
Yeah, the bailout essentially gives the VA the ability to take over the mortgages of veterans like the Queens and then allow the Queens to restart affordable mortgage payments, specifically at 2.5% for up to 40 years. It lets the VA offer a new on-ramp back onto the old mortgage payment highway.
Except... We do have one final stop on this story because during their year of reporting, Chris and Quill kept looking at this solution, this bailout, and saying, I think there is a huge hole in this VA fix. A big group of veterans getting left out here.
Chris and Quill went and visited. Hey, how are you doing?
Natalie had a very similar story to the Queens. During COVID, she had to stop working to take care of sick family, got forbearance on her VA loan, and then one day gets word that she cannot just start up payments again like she thought. Like the affordable on-ramp she thought that she would have was gone. And just like the Queens, she was instead presented with very bad on-ramps back to repayment.
And these will sound very familiar. On-ramp number one, pay all the money back at once, more than $15,000 in this case. That's a lot of money. Uh... And she couldn't do it. And they offered her this mod. On ramp number two, take a loan modification. Again, basically a whole new mortgage, but interest rates had gone way up.
Showing 121–140 of 152 · page 7 of 8
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