More and more Americans are discovering that bankers are more bark than bite:
A growing number of the people whose homes are in foreclosure are refusing to slink away in shame. They are fashioning a sort of homemade mortgage modification, one that brings their payments all the way down to zero. They use the money they save to get back on their feet or just get by. This type of modification does not beg for a lender’s permission but is delivered as an ultimatum: Force me out if you can. Any moral qualms are overshadowed by a conviction that the banks created the crisis by snookering homeowners with loans that got them in over their heads.
“I tried to explain my situation to the lender, but they wouldn’t help,” said Mr. Pemberton’s mother, Wendy Pemberton, herself in foreclosure on a small house a few blocks away from her son’s. She stopped paying her mortgage two years ago after a bout with lung cancer. “They’re all crooks.”
Foreclosure procedures have been initiated against 1.7 million of the nation’s households. The pace of resolving these problem loans is slow and getting slower because of legal challenges, foreclosure moratoriums, government pressure to offer modifications and the inability of the lenders to cope with so many souring mortgages.
The average borrower in foreclosure has been delinquent for 438 days before actually being evicted, up from 251 days in January 2008, according to LPS Applied Analytics.
I wouldn’t say they are all crooks, but certainly all the big bankers are. I don’t see why anyone who has a mortgage with any bank that received TARP money should pay them so much as a single dime. It is very clear that the rule of law no matter applies in the USA, so there’s no reason why the enmortgaged masses shouldn’t follow the lead of their would-be financial masters and ignore anything that isn’t in their immediate pecuniary interests.
If your credit is already ruined, why on Earth would you continue to send what little money you have left to a collection of bankrupt thieves and scam artists.