Law & Information

Health officials report the first case of swine flu appears to have happened in Clay County, according to a report. A probable case was identified Sunday and is just one of 15 in Florida that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are investigating.

As a result, an elementary school in Clay County, Oakleaf School K-through-eighth grade, will be closed for a few days, mostly as a precaution while the school cleans the classroom and the bus the student rode on. 1,650 students will be affected. The ill student is recovering.

Two swine flu cases are confirmed in Lee and Broward counties in South Florida, but the other probable cases are found in Orange, Indian River, Okeechobee, Miami-Dade, Alachua, Seminole and Palm Beach counties. Hillsborough County has six probable cases.

One of the confirmed cases struck a girl visiting the Orlando area from Mexico. She is the third confirmed case in the state and is recovering. The other case was an 11-year-old boy from Lee County and a 17-year-old girl from Broward County.

We are glad to report that the cases do not appear to be serious. The Pinellas county patient was not even hospitalized. Everyone with suspected cases in the state range in age from 7 to 75 and four cases are female, five male.

People can find out more by calling the state at 1-800-342-3557. We are very fortunate that this version of the flu does not seem to carry with it a death toll. So far in the U.S., one two –year-old boy, who had recently come to the U.S. from Mexico, died in a hospital in the states.

As personal injury attorneys in Florida, we would like to remind the everyone that whenever you are in public, be sure to wash your hands for at least 20 seconds with warn or hot water. That’s a very good habit to get into. Stay well everyone!!

This is a good news/ bad news story. The good news is there is plenty of opportunity for first time home buyers to take advantage of the depressed home prices brought about by desperate owners and foreclosures in the marketplace.

The bad news is that Florida is fourth in the nation in the number of homes entering foreclosure, according to a Jacksonville Business Journal article.

And Jacksonville has the dubious distinction of exceeding state and federal rates for foreclosures. In fact, rates here have hit a five-year high. In March, foreclosure related notices were sent out to 2,721 homes in Jacksonville – a 29 percent increase from February.

Duval County, the home of Jacksonville metro, saw foreclosure proceedings jump 42 percent in one year.

Contributing to the foreclosure rate is the fact that Jacksonville has about 16.1 percent of subprime loans. The numbers were provided to Reuters by First American LoanPerformance, an analytics unit.
Florida leads the nation along with California, Arizona, Nevada, and Illinois. Three million U.S. homes may receive a foreclosure notice before this year is up. As it now stands, one in every 159 U.S. homes with mortgages is being foreclosed, according to RealtyTrac.

Besides the bad economic times, major lenders are now calling in loans after giving borrowers a brief respite waiting to see what President Obama had in mind to address the nationwide foreclosure crisis.

Owner -occupied homes will be the only ones that may see some relief, while owners of rental homes and real estate speculators are not going to see any relief in the attitude of lenders.

Payday Loans have astronomically high interest rates, some as high as 400 percent, that take advantage of people in desperate need of cash. If you pay quickly, you are off the hook for a little, but if you don’t, a $300 loan can end up costing you about $800.

If you see them you should run the other way. But the truth is in these hard times, Payday loans are not going anywhere soon.

In Washington, the House is addressing the Payday Loan Reform Act, H.R. 1214. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) introduced the bill. He chairs the Consumer Credit Subcommittee. But according to a report, The Center for Responsible Lending, a Washington D.C. consumer group, does not agree with the bill because it doesn’t address the high cost of the short-term credit and the requirement that it must be paid back with a single paycheck.

HR 1214 does nothing to stop the 391 percent annual interest rate of a typical loan and does nothing to stop borrowers from being strapped in the high-cost debt. Lenders keep finding ways around the restrictions that do exist in some states. In Virginia for example, the lenders have open-ended loans, and in Illinois and New Mexico lenders avoided the laws in their states by changing their product to high-cost installment loans. Florida has tried payment plans but that has not slowed down the number of trapped borrowers.

The Center advocates a federal law that eliminates payday loan flipping and a cap on the rate of annual interest.

By contrast, the Center likes S. 500 introduced by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin and California Rep. Jackie Speier (H.R. 1608) that put a 36 percent annual interest cap on consumer loans. Putting a cap on the double or triple-digit annual interest rate is the only way to stop abusive payday loan flipping. Already military families are protected by the cap that Congress applied in 2006.

15 states plus the District of Columbia have stopped the consumer abuse by imposing a cap in the 36 percent range.

The Payday industry doesn’t like legislation restricting what they do. From a practical view, pawn shops say if Senate Bill 500 passes, they will have to close their doors. The shop owners say that the average pawn loan is just $80, so the high interest is needed just to stay in business.

As experienced personal injury attorneys in Florida who help people in difficult situations everyday, it is tempting to say all Payday activities should be shut down; however, the reality is that people need to get their hands on short-term money. Capping the interest rate and eliminating Payday loan flipping seems to be a reasonable first step to stop lenders from preying on someone’s misfortune.