By the time I pay rent for my space in the Banker & Tradesman newsroom, and by the time I pay the pizza-per-slice “lunch fee” and my share of the electric bill, there’s not much left to buy Greek and Spanish bonds.

But, a job is a job. Some of the alternatives are simply awful. Jeff Sovern, a professor of law at St. John’s University, suggested we encourage the growth of a new occupation: Mortgage counselor.

As he put it in a recent newspaper column, “life is full of complexities, and we have to find a way to deal with them: Hire an expert.

The Sovern recommendation: If you cannot or will not understand mortgage disclosure boilerplate (that encompasses just about everyone), then you should be required to hire a “mortgage counselor.”

A mortgage counselor. Hmmm. The closest that I ever came to dealing with a mortgage counselor is when my wife and I bought our first house. My mom, an unregistered, non-certified marriage and mortgage counselor, suggested we “rent an apartment, instead.”

For the thousands of basket-case “predatory mortgage” victims (if, in fact, they are actually “victims”), that would have been pretty good advice.

I suspect that if the mortgage counselor thing really caught on, most of the counselors would be housed in the offices of surly trial lawyers, with the implicit threat that if things didn’t quite work out, you could live the rest of your life in civil court – thus not really needing a home at all.

Unless the utilization of a mortgage counselor were required by law, I suspect the demand might be difficult to measure. After all, especially on the credit union/cuddly community bank side of things, the mortgage officers and assorted loan officers are trained to be warm and cuddly – reducing borrower suspicion and the instinct to run from the bank lobby screaming, to hire a mortgage counselor.

Seeking Counsel

The mortgage counselor thing probably makes the most sense for the underfunded and unsophisticated, surrounded by predatory lenders. As a mortgage counselor, I imagine that I would advise most of these folks to go live in the basement of mom and dad’s house, with the understanding that they would put enough aside in savings to pay for the inevitable psychiatric counseling – as opposed to mortgage counseling.

In Massachusetts, the real need for mortgage counseling might well come not on the side of the borrowers, but on the side of the banks. That grotesque legislation bouncing around the state legislature to deal with the foreclosure process might well increase demand for psychiatric and mortgage-counseling on the mortgage banker side of things.

Even the most sophisticated mortgage banking operations in the commonwealth might well need some Cohen-like wisdom. I could, as Banker & Tradesman has previously reported, provide a really, really good guess on the value of the dubious property, if sold; minus, of course, the cost of the foreclosure; versus the easy-to-calculate costs of modifying and servicing the loan; divided by the cost of Saudi crude on Tuesdays; multiplied by the expected Fed infusion by the end of the year. Those poor bankers would be crying out for counseling.

In the San Bernadino, Calif., environs, the county wants to snatch underwater mortgages from the current mortgage holders through eminent domain (call in the mortgage counselors and constitutional law attorneys), pretty them up and offer them back to the homeowners at a discount. Unofficial mortgage counselors in this case have advised the politicians to take a deep breath, get drunk, and let private investors sort out the mortgage mess and settle on appropriate home ownership and valuation.

At a time when quality 15 and 30-year mortgages are available at rates that mirror the salary increases offered to columnists at Banker & Tradesman, there is something to be said for a process of warning the eager home buyers to ponder the costs of heating and cooling and paying property tax and buying an alarm system and replacing all that “dated” kitchen stuff with stainless steel.

I could do that. I could be that kind of mortgage counselor.

But fighting my way through disclosure boilerplate? I’d rather be a columnist. Sigh.