We would first have to determine what we consider a responsibility. I have a responsibility to keep my house? To whom do I owe this responsibility? The bank? I don’t think my kids, wife or the world will suffer much although the neighbors might not like having an empty house and unmowed lawn in the neighborhood
No, you have a responsibility to honor the terms of the agreement you signed with the bank.
Although my main point was to ask again (you might have missed it amidst all the other discussion up-thread) if you really seriously need to move right now. Kids double up in bedrooms just fine.
That wouldn’t necessarily be the case (the unmowed lawn). In Wisconsin the homeowner is required to mow the lawn and shovel the sidewalks until after the foreclosure sale is concluded.
I have to add, your grasp of the meaning of responsibility is tenuous at best. I find your attitude reprehensible.
Double up? I remember when my three sisters and me all shared a bedroom. People don’t really require as much room as they think they do. More room is certainly nice, but not a matter of life or death.
I know I spoke harshly about this a bit earlier in the thread, but in the end, looking at it your way is not beneficial. To the bank, this is just a business transaction, subject to all the fine print and legality surrounding it. They count on people’s sense of self-worth being tied to honoring a “promise” while the bank itself feels no moral responsibility to hold itself to any promises it made that are not written down.
You owe the bank to adhere to the terms of the contract, and really nothing more than that. If you can leverage your position with them to get them to change the terms of your agreement, so much the better for you. Does this make you no better thanthe bank? Perhaps not. But in the business world, most companies do not get ahead by being morally superior to others. In my opinion, you don’t need to treat your financial transactions with a business as anything other than that, a financial transaction.
Where I have a problem with it is when someone uses funds taken from the taxpayers for distressed homeowners under false pretenses.
I don’t think it’s morally OK for businesses to do this.
I don’t think “other people do X” is much of an argument for X being a moral thing to do, either. As your mother no doubt told you when you were a kid, just because everybody’s doing it doesn’t make it a good thing to do.
I don’t think “they’d do X to me without hesitation if our roles in this situation were reversed” is a good argument that X is a moral thing to do, either.
I don’t believe there’s any such thing as “just a business transaction”. Morals and ethics should be a consideration in everything you do, not just in some special circumstances.
Strongly agree with some others. Get rid of some stuff and make do with what you have, for several reasons, not the least of which being that the market will recover eventually, and if you dip out, you’re going to take an unnecessary financial bath.
Certainly they should. You should always consider the morals and ethics of the business or person you are transacting with, and act accordingly. For example, I choose not to deal with loan sharks, because they operate outside the law with a moral code I do not understand.
I will choose to do business with someone who offers a legally binding contract with clearly spelled out terms. Those terms tell me what is expected of me, and what I can expect from them. Those terms tell me what the results of certain actions will be. For example, if I choose not to make payments, the term specify what actions the lender can take to recoup that cost.
Typically the repercussions for not honoring the initial expectations are much harsher, thus creating an incentive to honor the primary agreement. You can bet that, in a business transaction, if one company finds itsef in a position where the terms identify a more advantageous position one way than another, the business will take the more advantageous terms. Weighed amongst this is the perception of not honoring the original terms and how that affects other dealings. For people, it’s a FICO score, businesses have something else…I think. But treating a business relationship as anything other than business, getting emotionally invested, is not good policy. It leads to poor business and financial decisions.
You know, I started out firmly in the “foreclosing is wrong unless you actually have to” camp, but I’m not completely on board any longer. A deal is a deal, but part of the deal is that if he reneges, the bank takes the house back - the deal is not completely broken. The bank takes the house and goes off to make another deal with someone else.
I still wouldn’t go into foreclosure unless I had to for all the other reasons people have listed.
Yeah, I don’t look favorably on foreclosures or anything, but I don’t see it as the complete shame that many people see.
Where I see shame is trying to get taxpayer money to shelter you from the consequences (namely, being on the hook for the unrecoverable equity, etc).
Bingo. The deal was: either pay or the bank gets the house. Now the bank gets the house. The deal is kept.
Granted, I think the banks lately have been getting the raw end of the deal. But that’s what happens when a housing bubble collapses. They just didn’t count on it happening to so many people all at once.
Oh, and I’m actually in foreclosure, except I’m technically a tenant, as I pay to live with my parents. According to the lawyer, our current finances leave us $120 in the hole each month. Now you could say we shouldn’t have bought a house we couldn’t afford, but we didn’t expect to be in this situation 15 years ago. We didn’t think we’d have such high medical expenses, or have my dad laid off because of narcolepsy, and having a immoral lawyer string us along right up until the last minute and then bail on us with no explanation.
It seems that we and the banks are in the same boat. We didn’t plan for something this bad to happen, and, now that it has, we’re just trying to pick up the pieces and move on.
Ditto me on this sentiment. Another example is mortgage prepayment. Are you reneging on the “promise” to pay X in interest over 30 years in sodoing? Rubbish, right? What if you hit the Lotto and pay it all off after one year? Someone probably bought the mortgage as a cash flow investment, now those expected interest payments are gone.
There are rules for both sides in this financial contract, which include what happens on loan default. Choosing that option when it makes sense for you individually is not a moral issue any more than prepayment is.
Foisting the lien onto a co-signer, like a family member who helped you out, now THAT would be immoral because of the abrogation of family values.