Posted on 04/20/2010 11:50:10 AM PDT by 198ml
Surprise: NBC finally found a business it likes - even a business decision it likes: companies that help homeowners who decide to walk away from their mortgages.
"New figures show foreclosures in the U.S. are up about 35-percent from a year ago," Matt Lauer kicked off an April 20 segment of "Today" that encouraged homeowners - even those financially comfortable - to simply walk away. "And a growing reason why are people who simply choose to walk away from their mortgage even when they can afford it."
"Experian, the credit-monitoring service, says 588,000 borrowers - or 18-percent of those who have defaulted on their mortgages in the past year - did it for strategic reasons and not because they're broke," NBC's George Lewis reported. "It's called a strategic default, walking away from a home and enduring foreclosure out of frustration with a bad investment."
(Excerpt) Read more at newsbusters.org ...
Liberal scumbags can’t wait until America totally collapses.
I call “walking away” a real life example of “turnabout is fair play”.
‘Course, it’s easy for me to say that. I realized in the early 2000’s that we were in a manufactured bubble, so I refrained from buying. I continued to rent - and watched those rents go down as rental homes and apartments were abandoned by people realizing the “american dream” of owning a home worth 12 years wages. ;)
>>Liberal scumbags can’t wait until America totally collapses.<<
I would not say I can’t wait, but in a way, that is the only way I see out of this mess. Sometimes you just gott hit the reset button. The liberals will not go down without a fight, and nobody is willing to wage that fight. I see this going down like the last chapters of Atlas Shrugged.
I believe Detroit is a crystal ball into which people can look to see the fate of most of western civilization in the next decade or so. It is, as I write this, literally collapsing of its own weight, falling like a prom dress.
If the bank refuses to do a short sale, it does make sense to walk away and force them to foreclose. You will still be liable for the balance but you don’t have to incur additional losses beyond what it could sell for.
“New figures show foreclosures in the U.S. are up about 35-percent from a year ago,” Matt Lauer kicked off an April 20 segment of “Today” that encouraged homeowners - even those financially comfortable - to simply walk away. “And a growing reason why are people who simply choose to walk away from their mortgage even when they can afford it.”
I wish there were a way in which banks, etc could sue Matt Lauer for offering advice like this.
Once upon a time, jobs were ethical. If you did your job, even if you never improved at your job, you kept your job. Sure, you might have limited your promotional potential, but as long as you performed your assigned task - you earned your pay.
Then came the day of ‘do more each year, or we’ll fire you’. No matter how well you did your job; more was demanded each and every year.
Next, we had people who did their job, and then expanded their potential - but it didn’t matter because our Gov’t had created incentives for companies to ship those jobs overseas. Textile industry, tech industry, manufacturing of almost every stripe and what the US Gov’t didn’t destroy, unions did.
So, people who contributed and worked hard at their job; came to work to find that they had been ‘outsourced’ and laid off. Companies closed.
There was a time when the first person who experienced the dreaded RIF (Reduction In Force) was the CEO. Now CEO’s line their pockets by periodically creating a RIF to bump their stock prices.
Meanwhile, the poor worker loses their job, is forced to relocate and sell their house for less than what they purchase it - and then moves their family to an new home, only to experience the same thing .... over and over.
What do you expect? There are a great many professionals who no longer have a retirment fund, stocks or savings account; through no fault of their own.
Every problem you point out, has a single point of origion .... the US Congress.
It's not just a house--it's my home. Whether I paid too much or not--I don't know. I'm pretty sure I didn't. But it doesn't matter. It's where I live, and am raising my family. It's not an investment.
Did you see the news about Detroit's mayor wanting to bulldoze abandandoned businesses and turn it into farmland? He may be more forward-thinking than anyone expects.
I actually agree.
I don’t understand this “underwater” BS. Just about everytime you buy a car you are “underwater” as soon as you drive off the lot. As far as houses, most folks buy a house to live in not as an investment. When the house was purchased you agreed to a series of payments allowing you to live there. There is no guarantee the house will go up in value every year.
The media would be going nuts over all the bad news out there if a Republican were in control.
As it stands now, they will protect the democrats at all costs.
Traitorous scum...all of them.
Home prices need to go down further to re-establish equilibrium. That is going to happen whether anyone wants it to or not. Prices that are 4 to 5 times annual income are not sustainable.
It's a real estate transaction between a person and another party. That person has no obligation to their neighbors with regards to the value of their homes, and in reality, that foreclosure isn't what is causing the price destruction. Those forces are already acting on their own. The foreclosure simply forces a recognition of the price destruction that has already occurred because the asset was overvalued to begin with.
I must’ve missed the part of the bubble where people were forced to sign contracts to buy houses and take out a mortgage. Many of these people were making a bet that prices would continue to go up and they could make a profit. Nothing wrong with that.
Why should the mortgage holder get to keep the winnings from the bet if he/she guesses correctly and erase the bet if the guessed wrong? If this were really acceptable business bahavior, what good are contracts?
There are bankruptcy laws, you should be required to go through them in order to walk away from a home loan or other contract unless the other party agrees to some settlement.
For what purpose? The loan contract states that in the event the homeowner doesn't pay the loan, the bank gets the house. The bank agreed to that up front. That the bank doesn't want the house now because they loaned too much money on an overvalued asset doesn't suddenly make them the victim here.
With no allowance for actual market value...
...walking away from a property would be my advise to someone I cared about, with no alternative. It's in the contract, after all. Provision has been made.
Let the moneylenders play their game, themselves.
The 13 acre farm I bought in Kentucky (with a brand new “love nest” on it) was 80% of my annual income. I can go with that. Especially considering it is potentially revenue generating.
True, but then they won’t like what’s left behind either.
That is lost on too many people. That is why abandoning the age old practice of getting a down payment (i.e. skin in the game) was one of the first telling signs that we were in a pyramid scheme. The banks seemed to be unmoved by the risk they were taking on, as well as it's implications. They are now reaping the rewards of their unbridled exuberance. And they have ONLY themselves to blame.
A lot of the housing communities that have been bulldozed and then rebuilt with 4 times the residency on them (by building vertically) have hyped up the “buy now” pressure but they offer nothing lasting to the buyer. The land is worth “more” because the developer says so.
But in 20 years, what’ll it be?
And just because the tax assessor says it is worth more is not based on what the market value actually is. It became a back door way for communities to raise homeowners taxes without increasing the tax rate.
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