Can't pay? Just walk away.

 Hey, Borrower!

Screwed up your mortgage? Made all the wrong choices? You lucky real
estate investor, you STILL made the right choice! Thanks to recent
federal Debt Relief Legislation, by just walking away from your
overpriced speculative loser property and your lender, your credit can
recover faster than you can say "Bankruptcy? What's that?"

Why, in less that two years, you might just be able to qualify for
another fat, unaffordable mortgage! And you thought you lost everything.
Not to worry, even though this legislation benefits real estate
speculators the most, you too can win, win, win albeit at the expense of
your $500,000, 1 bedroom 1 bath bungalow, good economic practice and
national economic health!

Just don't declare bankruptcy, like someone in real financial trouble
might consider. If you declare bankruptcy, like some joker who lost
everything to unforseen disaster or illness, you are putting yourself at
the mercy of courts and banks (who make today's bankruptcy laws). If you
just walk away from a massive mortgage YOU freely chose, you get off
scott free, without any substantial penalty! After all, what
asset-draining cancer or chronic workplace injury could POSSIBLY be
worse than losing a home you couldn't afford in the first place?  

Even if you can afford your mortgage payment, this legal "Debt Relief"
may make it smarter to skip out: let's say your white elephant is
depreciating faster than a balloon in a needle factory. Don't wait for
forclosure-- walk away now! The government wrote a special law, just for
YOU! Yay! Just go out the front door, get in your Escalade, and leave
your house (don't worry, mommy and daddy will put you up). Don't look
back, there is only a hard lesson to be learned there. Now stay clean on
your other debt (like your credit cards and your SUV payment), and in
two or three years, any lenders left who haven't gone belly-up will be
breaking down your door to LEND YOU MONEY AGAIN!

Golly gee, thanks Congress! Thanks, Mr. President! You all may be total
fuckheads intent on ruining the country, but you are OUR kinds of
fuckheads! These are the kinds of moments that make you glad we sent all
those soldiers to die in Iraq. This is what it means to be American.

<http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/06/real_estate/walking_away/index.htm?secti
on=money_topstories>

<http://tinyurl.com/2jht8x>

 

Personally I think its wrong that Americans allow  private companies
(the credit reporting agencies) keep secret  files on citizens that
determine whether they are "credit worthy or not" and largely
determine what they will pay in interest charges for credit cards,
mortgages, etc.

What if you walked into a grocery store that charged high or low
prices for the same item dependant upon the the race or gender of the
person making the purchase? Nobody would put up with that...

The credit issuing companies are perfectly right in denying each
applicant credit or not, but if credit is granted...  Everyone should
pay whatever market rate is in effect at the time.

It makes no sense to declare someone a deadbeat and then say "for you,
you get a 9%, 10%, or 15% mortgage when every else is paying 5 1/2%
or, we will start you at a low rate for a year, but after that, you
are going to pay bonzo big bucks at twice or three times the market
rate.

Beachcomber

 Beachcomber wrote:


What's really ridiculous is that the credit reporting agencies receive a
special exemption from liability for the damages caused by reporting
false information about you.  Their only obligation is to remove the
information once *you* prove them wrong.  That's right, maintaining the
accuracy of their highly profitable database is somehow *your* job.

 invalid@notreal.none (Beachcomber) writes:

Secret?  You can pay these agencies to get a complete copy of your
credit report any time you want.  All of them are legally obligated by
Federal law to give you a free copy every year, and there are various
situations in which they would be legally obligated to give you a copy
more frequently than that.  Not only will they give you a complete
copy of your credit report, they'll also, for little and often no
money, tell you what your FICO score is and even tell you specifically
what you can do to improve it.


Your credit file does not determine what interest you pay; your
FINANCIAL HEALTH determines what interest you pay.  The information in
your credit file is used to determine your financial health, but that
information is driven by your own behavior and financial circumstances;
it doesn't appear there like magic.  And if there are mistakes, you
are legally entitled to correct them.

People who are better risks get better interest rates.  It's really
that simple.  It makes perfect sense.


You seem to have gone off on a tangent here, because there's nothing
about race in credit files, and sex is not a factor in your FICO score.
While it's certainly true that some lenders discriminate based on race,
and who knows perhaps some also discriminate based on sex (although I
don't recall hearing anything specific about that), this really has
nothing to do with your credit file, and it's ILLEGAL to boot.


No.  The credit issuing companies are perfectly right to charge higher
interest rates to people who are higher risks, because a larger
percentage of those people are going to default on their debts, and the
interest the companies earn from the other borrowers in those risk
pools needs to make up for the losses.

Furthermore, purely from the point of view of supply and demand,
lower-risk borrowers are more attractive to lenders, and therefore
lenders have to compete to earn their business by offering them lower
rates.

This is simple, straightforward capitalism.  There's nothing illogical
or unethical about it.


People aren't "declared" deadbeats by the credit agencies.  Their own
actions earn that status for them.  No one has the "right" to spend
more than they earn; it is a privilege that a person earns by proving
that s/he is a safe enough borrower that lenders will want to lend him
or her money.  If a person doesn't like the interest rates being
offered, then s/he doesn't have to borrow money.

And please spare me the canard about how it's a Catch-22 because you
can't fix a bad credit rating without being able to borrow money,
because it isn't true.  Even the worst deadbeats can get credit cards,
and it doesn't matter if the cards have an obscene interest rate,
because if you spend money on the card every month and then pay it off
at the end of the month without paying a penny of interest, that does
wonders for your credit rating.

--
Help stop the genocide in Darfur!
http://www.genocideintervention.net/

 

It's called freedom of speech. Something that Americans supposedly believe
in.

Your creditors freely chose to tell the credit bureaus their experiences
(good or bad) in investing in a loan to you. That information is purely
factual and is just as much theirs to share as it is yours. It's no
different than sites like bankrate.com rating credit card companies based on
experiences shared with it by its readers. Only difference is that bankrate
is far less regulated.

If you don't like it, you can try to negotiate a gag clause into your next
credit contract - though you probably don't have chance in hell of getting
anyone to agree to it.

Similarly, the credit bureaus don't "determine" anything. Nobody forces a
prospective lender to buy a FICO score or assign any importance to it in
deciding whether to invest their money in a loan to you. If a lender does
so, it's by that lenders choice. It's their money that they're investing.
Yes, you're unhappy that you have less than an iron grip on what information
the guy on the other side of the negotiating table gets to see - well who
isn't, but life doesn't work that way.



Which many do, depending on whether you're targeted for coupons, whether
you're buying additional units of the same item on the same shopping trip
and whether you're willing to barter your privacy as part of the trade via
those so-called "loyalty" cards.




"Market rate" is inherently different for different debtors just as with any
other investment. Just as the "market value" for an equivalent stock of one
company varies from that of another based on peoples perception of how much
growth potential the company has and how competent its management is, among
other factors.