A1 Mortgage Solutions

The excerpts below are quoted from :

“Walk Away From Your Mortgage”
By Roger Lowenstein
Contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine
Published:  January 7, 2010

Time was, Americans would do anything to pay their mortgage — forgo a new car or a vacation, even put a younger family member to work.  But the housing collapse left 10.7 million families owing more than their homes are worth.  So some of them are making a calculated decision to hang onto their money and let their homes go.  Is this irresponsible?

The moral suasion has continued under President Obama, who has urged that homeowners follow the “responsible” course.  Indeed, HUD-approved housing counselors are supposed to counsel people against foreclosure.  In many cases, this means counseling people to throw away money. Brent White, a University of Arizona law professor, notes that a family who bought a three-bedroom home in Salinas, Calif., at the market top in 2006, with no down payment (then a common-enough occurrence), could theoretically have to wait 60 years to recover their equity. On the other hand, if they walked, they could rent a similar house for a pittance of their monthly mortgage.

There are two reasons why so-called strategic defaults have been considered antisocial and perhaps amoral.  One is that foreclosures depress the neighborhood and drive down prices.  But in a market society, since when are people responsible for the economic effects of their actions? Every oil speculator helps to drive up gasoline prices.  Every hedge fund that speculated against a bank by purchasing credit-default swaps on its bonds signaled skepticism about the bank’s creditworthiness and helped to make it more costly for the bank to borrow, and thus to issue loans.   We are all economic pinballs, insensibly colliding for better or worse.

The other reason is that default (supposedly) debases the character of the borrower.   Once, perhaps, when bankers held onto mortgages for 30 years, they occupied a moral high ground. These days, lenders typically unload mortgages within days (or minutes). And not just in mortgage finance, but in virtually every realm of our transaction-obsessed society, the message is that enduring relationships count for less than the value put on assets for sale.

Mortgage holders do sign a promissory note, which is a promise to pay. But the contract explicitly details the penalty for nonpayment — surrender of the property.   The borrower isn’t escaping the consequences; he is suffering them.

In some states, lenders also have recourse to the borrowers’ unmortgaged assets, like their car and savings accounts. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond found that defaults are lower in such states, apparently because lenders threaten the borrowers with judgments against their assets. But actual lawsuits are rare.

And given that nearly a quarter of mortgages are underwater, and that 10 percent of mortgages are delinquent, White, of the University of Arizona, is surprised that more people haven’t walked. He thinks the desire to avoid shame is a factor, as are overblown fears of harm to credit ratings. Probably, homeowners also labor under a delusion that their homes will quickly return to value. White has argued that the government should stop perpetuating default “scare stories” and, indeed, should encourage borrowers to default when it’s in their economic interest. This would correct a prevailing imbalance:  homeowners operate under a “powerful moral constraint” while lenders are busily trying to maximize profits. More important, it might get the system unstuck.

If  lenders feared an avalanche of strategic defaults, they would have an incentive to renegotiate loan terms. In theory, this could produce a wave of loan modifications — the very goal the Treasury has been pursuing to end the crisis.

No one says defaulting on a contract is pretty or that, in a perfectly functioning society, defaults would be the rule.   But to put the onus for restraint on ordinary homeowners seems rather strange.

Link to the full article

Tags: mortgage rates, underwater, upside down

This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Economic Outlook, Interest Rates, Mortgage News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.