“Homeowners: Can’t pay? Just walk away”
This was an actual headline on CNNMoney.com yesterday. It is garbage like this that is taking an already unfortunate situation and making it worse!
I promise you, that SINGLE STATEMENT right there opens up a whole can of worms on a problem that is taking Congress, the President, and many, many people who are WAY smarter than I am to try and figure out. So I cannot even really scratch the surface of talking about a problem that has taken reams of paper to write the bills that have been created to try and fix it. And listen, I know the ISSUE is the fact that people aren’t or can’t make their mortgage payments are losing their homes, while the PROBLEM is the reasons why they can’t.
People in the banking world (yes that includes brokers), have put these people in loans that aren’t right for their situation. Then there’s the falling home values, and on and on. I know one came before the other, but come on? Just tell people to walk away from their homes?
What happened to the days of doing what you said you would do? In this case, paying your mortgage? If you lost your job that is one thing. But there has been so much fraud in this business, much of it from investors who started the idea of walking away that led to massive amounts of foreclosures. This led to distressed neighborhoods, which led to lower property values. Now we have an article with a headline like this! And on top of it all, there is a company in San Diego called “YouWalkAway.com” where for $1000, they will walk you through the process of ditching your home!
With all that is going on, I think we will see more and more people trying to make a buck on losing their homes. As for the headline of the article, the writer subjectively looked at how easy it was for people to walk away from their homes when you are upside down $60,000 or more (meaning you can’t refinance), your ARM just adjusted upwards (meaning your payments are going up), and you started missing payments because you can’t afford your current ones and you can’t refinance. Maybe it IS easier to walk away and that is a sad commentary on the state of homeownership right now.
Craig Pollard is a mortgage professional and owner of Texas Mortgage Team. He specializes in the Dallas Fort Worth area and is a frequent voice on Texas Home Central’s blog. Craig can be reached at 972-317-9900 or emailed by clicking here.
Tags: Foreclosure
This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 10:22 am and is filed under Foreclosure, Housing Market, Mortgage, Real Estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.