Answering a New Call

March 25, 2008 on 7:39 pm | In Baby Boomers |

When I started the American Homeowners Association (AHA) in 1994, my mission was to help typical, middle class Americans to have access to a better quality of life through special savings and good advice not easily available to most people. I knew that most homeowners find themselves squeezed for time and money. I had at an earlier time been involved as an author and magazine publisher in the field of planning for retirement, so I knew that historically, owning your home was a key way many people achieved financial security. I wanted people to join AHA (www.ahahome.com) and to help people make good decisions, spend wisely, save money, and end up with a more secure retirement.

Since I had talked with and listened to thousands of homeowners while running a mortgage auditing business, it was clear to me they all had similar problems and were burdened with the same high expenses, headaches and ripoffs from owning a home. So I decided to do something about it, and felt there was a good business model in emulating the AAA, but for homeowners, not automobiles.

Remember, this was before the internet (needless to say, the first time I experienced the World Wide Web live, which was about 1995–it utterly blew my mind!).

So what did we accomplish? Well for one thing, my testimony to a sub-committee of the House Banking Committee (the U.S. Congress) blew the lid off a major escrow overpadding ripoff being perpetuated by the mortgage servicing industry, and I helped create the new legislation that resulted in refunds of overcharges totaling about $5 billion in cash back to homeowners. That’s Billions with a B. And since then (1995) more billions have been refunded from escrow overages at the end of each year to homeowners. If you’ve ever received one of these multi-hundreds or thousand dollar checks (I have received several, always a happy event)–well… you’re welcome. You can find this testimony word for word by searching “Google Books” for “U.S. House Banking Escrow Hearing 1993″.

I did the same thing in the U.S. Senate, testifying and helping to pass a bill stopping PMI insurance companies from continuing to charge the monthly PMI charge (Private Mortgage Insurance) after the loan balance was paid down below the downpayment “gap” that the PMI was supposed to cover. In other words, they continued to collect and lenders continued to require payment of these monthly PMI insurance premiums, for years or decades after there was no longer any risk being insured against. More billions saved for middle class homeowners. You can find this testimony on Google search under Richard J. Roll U.S. Senate Testimony.

We created and distributed the most comprehensive step-by-step guide anywhere for homeowners on how to reduce unfair or overassessed property taxes, which was raved about in Money magazine and on CNN. Our advice on this and numerous other essential homeowner subjects and issues has appeared in thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, and on every major TV network and hundreds of radio shows.

We advocated heavily across the U.S. for smoke alarm awareness and twice annual battery replacement, or ideally, permanently wired smoke alarms, after one of our beloved AHA customer service representatives and her infant daughter were killed in an early morning fire due to a non-functional smoke alarm.

But today is a new day, and there are new challenges facing Americans. One of the greatest challenges, for the 78 million Baby Boomers who are getting on in years (including myself), is how to be prepared for the financial and health challenges of living a much longer life than our predecessors. Today my generation, the oldest group being ages 52 to 62, are seeing their home equity value shrink to percentage levels not seen in generations, while the U.S. economy falters, the stock markets are in decline (and thus 401k accounts and other retirement portfolios), interest rates are a pittance, Baby Boomers are over-invested in homes and other real estate which are plummeting in value…sound like a good challenge?

So I’ve got a new mission (actually, I’ve been working on this for well over two years): it’s called BBRC, the Baby Boomers Retirement Club. And you can see a preview of it at www.mybbrc.com. Our Mission: Get you to a secure retirement future in just 10 minutes. Free. Through an ingenious 10-Question Quiz, and there are no wrong answers.
Stay tuned.

All the best–Richard

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