Troubled Homeowners: Can’t Pay? Just Walk Away
February 7th, 2008Can’t pay? Just walk away.
It has a nice, simple ring to it. Kinda catchy.
Jingle mail is another term that’s making its way around suburban ghettos and corporate boardrooms. Jingle mail is what happens when the zombie slobs leave their house keys in the mail box and “just walk away” from their upside down McMansions.
Here’s something that I wrote about voluntary simplicity in terms of asymmetric warfare:
In America (and wealthier parts of the “West” in general), people don’t have to blow up a natural gas pipeline and shut down a factory or cut enough fiber to crash the NYSE and the NASDAQ market systems for a few minutes, hours or days. Voluntary simplicity, or, living well on very little money, kicks evil people in the nuts and gouges out their eyes. (Pacifists may think of this as sending the enemy Joy and Happiness if they desire.) Doing this in the U.S. has a force multiplier effect because the U.S. is the largest source of the funds that keep the global ponzi scheme running. When people in wealthy countries opt out, the action causes major economic damage to the machine.
…
It’s a matter of hacking The Matrix in an efficient and innovative manner to reduce your monthly expenses to a fraction of previous levels. The extraction/domination system in the U.S. has few effective defenses against people who opt out—to the extent possible—by making smart use of available resources. The system assumes that you’ll stay hooked forever on a lifestyle built around profligate waste and going deep into debt to buy crap that you don’t really want, or need. Indeed, most people are content to go through life this way.
If a regular insurgency movement reduced the banks and their data centers to piles of smoking rubble and assassinated the executives and members of the boards of directors, that situation would represent a walk in the park compared to what “consumers” are about to do by abandoning their McMansions and stucco boxes.
Obviously, this isn’t a conscious insurgency movement, with Joe and Jane Zombie Slob plotting to stick it to “the man.”
Maybe it’s a subconscious insurgency movement, where all those years of thinking, “F*$% this,” and “Actually, my life sucks,” and, “This can’t continue,” are boiling over into simple actions that hurt the machine, and bad. It’s a very dangerous situation for Them when the herd realizes that it can, “just walk away.”
Of course, it’s not that easy, but the herd has never bothered itself much with the details. Maybe some people will learn a few lessons from their experiences. My guess is that 99% of the zombie slobs will simply do it all again, given the opportunity.
Via: CNN:
Mortgage payments are set to jump. Home prices have plunged. “I’m outta here.”
Homeowners are abandoning their homes and, more importantly, their mortgages, rather than trying to keep up with rising payments on deteriorating assets. So many people are handing their keys back to lenders that a new term has been coined for it: jingle mail.
…
Current lending practices have created an environment where a measure as extreme as abandoning a home actually makes sense to some people.
Many buyers put little or no money down, so they don’t have much invested in them. That leaves them with little incentive to keep making payments when a home’s market value dips below the balance of the mortgage.
The most serious consequence is a tremendous hit to credit scores. For some, that’s better than throwing away money they’ll never recover by selling their home.
Speaking of catchy rings, Zombie Slobs is an amusing coinage.
I think it’s great. More posts like this please.