NYTIMES LAST WEEK:New research suggests that when a home’s value falls below 75 percent of the amount owed on the mortgage, the owner starts to think hard about walking away, even if he or she has the money to keep paying.
In a situation without precedent in the modern era, millions of Americans are in this bleak position. Whether, or how, to help them is one of the biggest questions the Obama administration confronts as it seeks a housing policy that would contribute to the economic recovery.
“We haven’t yet found a way of dealing with this that would, we think, be practical on a large scale,” the assistant Treasury secretary for financial stability, Herbert M. Allison Jr., said in a recent briefing.
... “We’re now at the point of maximum vulnerability,” said Sam Khater, a senior economist with First American CoreLogic, the firm that conducted the recent research. “People’s emotional attachment to their property is melting into the air.”
Suggestions that people would be wise to renege on their home loans are at least a couple of years old, but they are turning into a full-throated barrage. Bloggers were quick to note recently that landlords of an 11,000-unit residential complex in Manhattan showed no hesitation, or shame, in walking away from their deeply underwater investment.
“Since the beginning of December, I’ve advised 60 people to walk away,” said Steve Walsh, a mortgage broker in Scottsdale, Ariz. “Everyone has lost hope. They don’t qualify for modifications, and being on the hamster wheel of paying for a property that is not worth it gets so old.”
Mr. Walsh is taking his own advice, recently defaulting on a rental property he owns. “The sun will come up tomorrow,” he said.
The difference between letting your house go to foreclosure because you are out of money and purposefully defaulting on a mortgage to save money can be murky.
I THINK ALL LIBERALS ARE HYPOCRITES.figuring out whether to stay or walk requires calculations too complicated and time consuming for the average homeowner to perform. (View the paper to see the calculations.) For those who don’t want to do the calculations themselves, the online “Does It Make Financial Sense To Walk Away & Rent?” calculator at YouWalkAway.com can help.ME LAST WEEK:
AWFUL.
FOR DECADES LIBS LIKE THOSE AT THE NYTIMES PRESSURED POLITICIANS TO FORCE THE BANKS TO MAKE BAD LOANS (THE CRA).
NOW THEY ARE FACILITATING THE DEMISE OF THOSE LOANS.
UNBELIEVABLE.
WHY?!
- THEIR POLICIES DON'T WORK AND ARE ANTI-INDIVIDUAL.
- SO, WHEN IT COMES TO THEIR OWN LIVES, LIBS OPT OUT OF THEIR IDEOLOGY.
- AND BECAUSE THEY'RE MORAL RELATIVISTS THEY HAVE A READY-MADE AND HANDY EXCUSE.
THEY CAUSED THE HOUSING BUBBLE. AND THEY'RE WRECKING THE US FEDERAL BUDGET.
AND OUR ABILITY TO DEFEND THE FREE WORLD.
THERE'S ONLY ONE WAY TO STOP THEM: VOTE GOP THIS NOVEMBER.
Wow -- the Times doesn't have a strict ideological line dictated by ideological purity, and rigorously focus-grouped by apparatchik pollsters.
ReplyDeleteI guess, since you're a right-winger, that must seem really, really strange to you.
advising people to walk away from loans is bad - no matter what anyone claims their ideology is or what name you choose to call them.
ReplyDeletepeople walking away from mortagages because they are "underwater" is the biggest problem in real estate nd banking.
it should concern you that libs like the nytimes evidently think it's an okay thing to do.
but you are a fucking asshole, so it mustn't seem strange at all to you.