What Does A Pig, Or A Snake, Or A Monkey, Have To Do With Mortgage Rates?

Factual Questions
1

Apparently mortgage rates are at the lowest they’ve ever been, and are getting lower, all the time, especially for people with bad credit or no credit – at least to judge from the dozens of banner ads and pop-ups I keep getting. By my calculation, they should now be paying me 43% on my mortgage given this constant fall.

When these ads first started coming out, they’d often have little animated pictures of leaves, or snowflakes, or raindrops, falling, each with a state abbreviation. Okay, I get it, rates are falling in your state.

But now . . . they’re just bizarre. I saw one with a gingerbread man scraping other gingerbread men with state abbreviations off of a cookie sheet. Recently there’s been a lot with big snakes and pigs and monkeys, each segmented into little abbreviations.

What are these things supposed to have remotely to do with mortgage rates?

2

About as much as a picture of a cute woman in a miniskirt would. It’s an eye-catching image and like it or not you seem to have looked at a number of the pictures, even if just to wonder “WTF???” which from the advertiser’s perspective means there’s a chance that you’ll read the ad itself.

I assume they’re using gingerbreadmen instead of bikini babes since the former doesn’t seem sleazy (at least coming from a lender).

3

I think they’re going for images that can fit 50 state abreviations in them. Snake scales, corn kernels, that sort of thing. Whether the image has anything to do with a home loan doesn’t seem to be in the equation.

4

Maybe in Chinese astrology, those years are lucky ones for taking out a mortgage??