I have been financing homes now for 17 years. Most of the focus of the applicant’s ability to repay a loan is placed on his current earnings. Sure, there are credit and appraisal requirements, but by and large, my time is spent analyzing income. Hundreds of studies have been done to correlate income and credit, and guess what? There is absolutely zero correlation (which is one of the reasons why the “stated income” loans just didn’t work out). So most of the time spent crunching numbers by myself, my processor, my underwriter, and even the back-end auditors, is done so analyzing income.
So When a study comes out that shows an overwhelmingly convincing correlation between income and health, my interest is piqued. This is not a study of causation, attempting to prove that people earn money because they are fit and vice versa, but merely noting a strong interrelationship between the two factors and their inverses as well. You can click on the logo below to see the 148 page study by United Health Foundation. The one habit favoring low-wage individuals is that of binge drinking.
