I’m a big fan of The New York Times and LA Times, and read them daily.  Being a freelance writer has the disadvantage of not getting out into the world much, and these fine folk keep me informed, along with Reuters, Google and Yahoo.  I had wrote previously about people walking away from their homes, and was prompted by an article I read today in The NY Times that drove me to comment on it today.

In my article I talked about people walking away from their homes, and what was causing them to do so.  It made little sense to me at the time, and still does not.  We hear all the time about high profile people like Jose Canesco, who supposedly walked away from his home, yet these high profile cases are surely not typical of every American. The term “jingle mail” amused me.  It’s a phrase coined by the banking industry because of people mailing in their keys, and the resulting jingle when the envelope is shaken.  Funny, but sad.

Checking the figures at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reveal that Freddie shows just 0.14 percent of the defaulted mortgages in its portfolio involved properties that were abandoned by borrowers.  Fannie reports that the numbers are single digit.  Isn’t this more like common era?  Granted, these are not sub prime loans.  But the numbers are reflective of how the market outside sub prime is doing.  We must take into account that many of these homes are properties that homeowners owe much more on than they are valued at.  But to me, the old adage that a man’s home is his castle is sacrosanct, and that is how it should be.

We see a lot of doom and gloom on the evening news these days, with rising food and gas prices, and people struggling to stay afloat.  this is to me much more realistic than the so called attitude of just walking away from your obligations.  Read most any blog and this is what you hear.

The Times blames a lot of these figures on speculators that are walking away from homes they have bought to turn around for a profit and then have lost out.  I think this is really more of a better picture than the Average Joe who is just saying no and walking away.  According to Robert Van Order, an adjunct professor of finance at the University of Michigan, Investors “are going to default right away because they have negative equity. But that’s different from people who moved into the house.”  You can understand this.  The NBC Nightly News last night featured a woman who had the sheriff at her doorstep with an eviction notice, even though she had been making monthly payments on time, and did her end.  The owner?  He just stopped making payments because he was losing money.  And that put the lady and her 4 year old daughter in dire straits.  One has to wonder where the equity of it all is…