No need for tears, but the well-off are losing their master suites and saying goodbye to their wine cellars.Just because you're wealthy doesn't mean you can't make a bad investment, and buying a million-dollar home at the market peak and then seeing that value drop to say, $600,000 in a couple of years is a really, really bad investment. The difference is these are folks who often have other assets and can walk away from it and recover. The folks who have 90% of their total wealth tied up in a home that has lost 30% of its market value since 2007, those are the ones in real trouble.
The housing bust that began among the working class in remote subdivisions and quickly progressed to the suburban middle class is striking the upper class in privileged enclaves like this one in Silicon Valley.
Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.
More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.
By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.
Though it is hard to prove, the CoreLogic data suggest that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties, just as they would any sour investment.
“The rich are different: they are more ruthless,” said Sam Khater, CoreLogic’s senior economist.
And it's not like enterprising souls can trade up to these cheaper McMansions because they can't sell their existing homes to free themselves up, and if they did, they'd take a similar percentage hit on the home their are trying to sell to trade up.
It's not poor minorities walking away from their homes here at nearly twice the national average, folks.
i guess a certain libertarian nitwit will be around later to suggest that the wealthy aren't meeting their mortgage obligations because they're being taxed into the poorhouse! it's class warfare, i tells ya!
ReplyDeletehi wafflez.
you actually check the "new comments" list regularly to make sure nobody gets the last word, don't you? is this compulsion of yours the reason nobody at work will talk to you? the reason you have no friends? do you have any control over it? you poor crazy bastard. not that i feel sorry for you, as you're also a smug stupid ass.
have a nice weekend wearing a tinfoil hat or burning effigies of obama on your front porch or whatever the hell people like you do.
I check from time to time and respond, that's what a dialogue is you're aware of that fact right? Normal conversation and/or debate doesn't involve people getting insulted by a stooge and just sitting around without responding, despite what you seem to think. Me having a differing opinion doesn't make me wrong, or you wrong. It means I don't share your opinion. Are you really so close minded that you think you're the ONE TRUE WAY? Get over yourself and try to remember that by posting like you have, you only confirm I've gotten to you. Tool.
ReplyDeleteU mad bro?