By Mitchell D. Weiss If you're one of the 28% of U.S. homeowners with a mortgage that's higher than your house is currently worth, is it time to toss...
Growing numbers of rich Americans are welcoming the foreclosure crisis into their homes. Default rates for the nation's most expensive properties ...
The "moral hazard" is worse than you feared: Americans are figuring out that morality changes as society changes, and that morality no longer includes obediently paying the mortgage
In 2008, walking away from a severely underwater home was the ideal financial choice, in hindsight. In 2012 it may not be.
There are a still few regions where foreclosure is never discussed beyond the immediate family, but it's less and less often due to the morality issue. This, I believe, is the beginning of the fourth and last wave of home walkaways.
News frequently portrays inability to rent as one of the gloom-and-doom scenarios awaiting people who have been through a foreclosure. In my surveys around the U.S., I'm not seeing this.
We don't condemn bed-smokers to suffer the consequences of their risky behavior because the fire can spread. If we want to stop the spread of strategic defaults, principal writedowns are the most effective option.
A Trulia/Harris survey in 2010 found that 57% of men would consider strategic default, but only 40% of women would. In the real world of mortgage default, where walkaways are far more often for survival than strategy, I found the opposite.
A "strategic default" currently means walking away from an underwater home even though the owner could afford to pay the mortgage. However, this repre...
What is happening in the Sunshine State could spread. And if it does, the financial markets will face another round of intense pressure that could be even tougher to contain than before.
Despite efforts by industry and elected officials to discourage it, more and more borrowers may choose to exercise their option to default.
Taxpayer-owned mortgage giant Fannie Mae is targeting families by going after struggling homeowners who strategically default on their mortgage, the f...
The United States will probably default on its debt one day. There, I said it. Did I get your attention?
The Obama administration's signature foreclosure-prevention program is likely to be a failure and has not done enough to help struggling homeowners wh...
Time was when Americans would do almost anything to hang on to their homes. But that commitment appears to be fraying as more people fall behind on th...
The nation's second-biggest bank is warning investors that underwater homeowners may walk away from their mortgages. In a Monday filing with the Secu...
Millions of Americans are now deeply underwater on their mortgage. If you're among them, you need to stop living in a dream world and give serious tho...
The nation's second-largest bank expects the number of delinquent home loans to skyrocket over the next year, echoing analysts' expectations of a gloo...
With an increasing number of people walking away from their underwater mortgages, there's much discussion among the chattering classes about so-called...
Many critics of the Obama administration's mortgage loan-modification program say it won't work because it doesn't do enough to address "negative equi...
Last month a study from the credit reporting agency Experian and consulting outfit Oliver Wyman estimated that close to a fifth of troubled mortgages ...
To the extent that Morgan Stanley is leading by example, the securities colossus is sending an unlikely message to underwater homeowners: Walk away. ...
How many homeowners are over-levered and at imminent risk of default? This answer is...a lot more than most think, especially those who got a loan fro...
Here are some questions the financial crisis commission could ask of failed lenders that generated many of the subprime loans that have performed so poorly.
Who is more likely to walk away from a house and a mortgage -- a person with super-prime credit scores or someone with lower scores? Research using...
