I heard a name for something today that made me smile. It’s a phenomenon I’ve known about forever, but no one had ever suggested a name for it. It’s called Ruthless Default and the name is absolutely perfect.
Ruthless Default is a term used by financial institutions when a borrower decides they are not going to pay another dime on their debt. I’ve known people to drive cars for years before the repo man caught up to them. I’ve known people to move out of an apartment in the dead of night to avoid overdue rent payments. And now I’ve got a name for it.
Ruthless Default is the last rebellion of the chronically indebted. And I love it.
Now that the housing market is in the tank, more people than ever are taking this approach to their mortgage. Listening to NPR today, I learned about a company that promises to walk people through Ruthlessly Defaulting on their home. The company promises up to 8 months of free living before the bank can kick you out. I laughed through the whole report.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be responsible and pay your debts. But when the balance of power between lender and borrower is as out-of-whack as it is currently, you have to love the spirit behind Ruthless Default. When a borrower receives a letter telling them that their mortgage payment is going to jump by 75%, there’s something poetic about them saying, “I’m not giving you a thing. Foreclose on me, bitch!”
February 26th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
The only flipside to that is the Ruthless Day Of Reckoning. My cross-street neighbors apparently paid no rent for the six months they were in that house and left their four kids - ages 14-9 - alone in the house during the week while they worked in Alabama. The kids had nothing, really, and barely even saw Dad on the weekend (maybe on Sunday he’d swing by; we never saw Mom at all).
They were in the house from last June - December, when the eviction guys just threw all their stuff out into the yard like trash. It was so bad that I thought there had been a housefire and the firemen just tossed stuff out all to hell. But my neighbor said that no, they’d been evicted and the kids had even been there to see it all - crying because they didn’t understand why the few belongings they had were just being yanked out of the house and thrown outside like they were criminals.
I think the dad found an apartment to move his kids into. But I was left wondering, after what I saw following that eviction, if his six months of paying no rent was worth watching his kids suffer like that. My own thought is, in the end, they were the ones who paid the highest price.