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Wednesday February feature home of the week ROOMY ENTRANCE Come and see and you will agree that this immaculate 3 bedroom side split is what you have been looking for Roomy entrance foyer bay window in living room and yes it has a room Powder room on the main floor finished recreation room and schools transportation shopping plaza are within walking distance Call Stephen P Saxe Limited Realtor Ask for Robin Fischer Sales Representative Leonard Rosen berg MONTHLY in praise of modem mortgages Port So think you vc got tough The Christmas spree is over and your monthly bills have come back to haunt you Courage There nothing quite like a history lesson to lend perspective to one predicament The next two Money Monthly columns you read are designed to make you smile A mortgage as a wit once remarked is that wh makes the months seem shorter and the years seem longer It is also a con word for describing one of those long term comm we would rather not face We mortgage our future our resportsibilitesweghdown upon us like a mortgage and if you want to write that last forever sign a mortgage In fact few words in the English language outside of our metaphorical abuse over the years as he lowly mortgage And reason is definitely not because mortgage is two four letter words joined together The word mortgage derives from the gage or pledge of land or chattel that was used to secure loans in the Saxon and early Norman periods The first mention of the gage appears in William the Conqueror s Domesday Book If the creditor retained the rents and profits from an estate to discharge a debt the transaction was known as a live If the gagcedebtor kept the income it was known as a dead gage mortgage or mortgage Though our word for mortgage may date from early English times the concept originated long before In fact the recorded legal history of several great civilizations begins with elaborate regulation of credit The rules which the ancients used to control credit and real estate however would strike our century borrower as being rather one sided to say the least Tor example in the penod marking stones called horoi were used to des the ownership of real property Usually the stones were marked with the name of the tor and the penalty to the borrowers for tampering them was severe You can imagine how the Department of mortgage lender placed stone markers around your front lawn bearing the inscription This is the property of the Friendly Family Mortgage and Loan Inc and threatening you with Ihe loss of your wife and left foot for displacing them Public loans used to secure real estate in ancient Greece were usually due after five yean and were not paid off in regular amounts A borrower was expected to pay off and in in one lump sum at the end of a set a requirement which resulted in a very high default rate Such loans were usually secured by expensive pledges and the security some times took strange forms The city of Cyme pledged her public colonnades and when the city defaulted her citizens could not use the shelters to get out of the sun or rain Perhaps the oddest collateral in history was that used in the middle ages by Baldwin King of Jerusalem Pressed for money he borrowed on his beard Not such a bad idea now that think of it Leonard Rosenberg is the President of Greymac Mortgage Corporation an Ontariobased financial firm specializing in mortgages Write to him in are of this newspaper