rssHouse Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters
Friday, June 18, 2010 at 5:39 pm
- 39 Comments
Last week, I noted that House Republicans had introduced a motion to penalize strategic defaulters — underwater homeowners who simply stop paying their mortgages and surrender their homes to the bank — by barring them from obtaining Federal Housing Administration-backed loans in the future. I hadn’t noticed until now, but the House ended up passing its FHA Reform Act with the penalization for strategic defaulters in the bill. (The act now needs Senate approval before it becomes law.) Rep. Chris Lee (R-N.Y.) got the provision in there on an unopposed unanimous consent motion.
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) supported the strategic-defaulter provision, if crankily: “I am going to urge people to vote for it. I will say that it might need a word or two of improvement. If it had, in fact, been offered at the Financial Services Committee, either provision, we could have accepted it then, but then members wouldn’t have had a chance to make dramatic speeches on the floor, so I suppose that explains why we had to go through this.”
Here is Lee on the motion:
According to a study by Experian and management consulting firm Oliver Wyman, from 2007 to 2008, the number of strategic defaults more than doubled to 588,000, and a separate 2009 survey found that more than a quarter of all existing defaults were strategic.
Meanwhile, there are lawyers, scam artists and opportunists touting the financial benefits of walking away from a mortgage and offering to help you do that for a fee. Not a day goes by that we don’t read another news article about folks who are making calculated decisions to stop paying their mortgages even though they still have the ability to pay. We are not talking about those families who have fallen on hard times or who simply can no longer afford to make their payments. We are talking about this new trend of people who voluntarily choose to stop paying their mortgages even though they still have the ability to pay.
While these decisions should ultimately be left to the individual, we should put in place more stringent penalties to discourage this irresponsible behavior. If borrowers make decisions to strategically default on their loans, they certainly should not be allowed to benefit from a government-subsidized program.
This motion makes it clear: if you can afford to pay your mortgage and choose not to, you will no longer be eligible to secure an FHA mortgage. This motion calls on the Secretary of HUD to define strategic default and to work with lenders to identify and to prevent borrowers from participating in the FHA program.
The language prohibits the FHA from “newly [insuring] any mortgage under this title that is secured by a 1- to 4-family dwelling unless the mortgagee has determined, in accordance with such standards and requirements established by the Secretary, that the mortgagor under such mortgage has not previously engaged in any strategic default with respect to any residential mortgage loan.” It says that the FHA needs to figure out what an “intentional default” is in the first place.
Here is what I wrote on this topic last week:
[Republicans argue] that strategic default needs to be legislated away, and its perpetrators punished. But strategic defaulters are not committing some felony or crime. They are not even really breaching their contracts. Every mortgage contract spells out what happens if the homeowner does not pay: The bank evicts them and takes the home.Furthermore, the Republican letter does not spell out how the government would designate someone as a strategic defaulter anyway. Strategic defaulters are people who could continue to pay their mortgages but choose not to. Defaulters are people who cannot continue to pay their mortgages. But does the government really want to stipulate that homeowners have to hand over, say, up to their last $2,000 of savings to the bank before they can walk away from their home? Up to their last five percent of annual income? What if those people need the money to move, or to pay medical bills, or to buy shoes for their kids? Since when have Republicans advocated telling Americans how they can and cannot spend their money?
[...]
The way to tackle this problem is to … lower the number of strategic defaults. The best way to do that is to make sure that the recovery is strong, employment is growing and that homeowners are not underwater. Improving the Home Affordable Modification Program and “cramdown” provisions would go a long way to reducing homeowners’ monthly payments and principal, helping to keep them in their homes.
I repeat the point. There are better ways to deal with this problem than to have the FHA attempt to identify and punish strategic defaulters, particularly if Congress does nothing to ameliorate the underlying issue of homeowners being underwater on their mortgages.
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39 Comments
Pingback posted June 18, 2010 @ 5:52 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by The Mighty OCD, WashIndependent. WashIndependent said: House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters – http://bit.ly/doidst [...]
Pingback posted June 18, 2010 @ 7:02 pm
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 18, 2010 @ 9:03 pm
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Comment posted June 18, 2010 @ 10:39 pm
Seems of a piece with the Bankruptcy Reform law: saving creditors from their usurious, and lucrative, practices without effectively regulating them.
Pingback posted June 19, 2010 @ 12:10 am
[...] hostile to legislation that would make it easier on debtors. For example, House Republicans have introduced (and passed in the House) legislation that would penalize strategic defaulters: The language prohibits the FHA from “newly [insuring] [...]
Pingback posted June 19, 2010 @ 3:16 am
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 19, 2010 @ 3:58 am
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 19, 2010 @ 5:14 am
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Comment posted June 19, 2010 @ 4:42 am
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Pingback posted June 19, 2010 @ 6:40 am
[...] This motion calls on the Secretary of HUD to define strategic default and to work with lenders to identify and to prevent borrowers from participating in … Read this story… [...]
Pingback posted June 19, 2010 @ 7:15 am
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 19, 2010 @ 7:21 am
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 19, 2010 @ 7:26 am
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 19, 2010 @ 7:44 am
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 19, 2010 @ 9:21 am
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 19, 2010 @ 10:31 am
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 19, 2010 @ 2:29 pm
[...] Lowrey writes about efforts underway in the House of Representatives to penalize those who “strategically default” on their home mortgages. I note as background something that others have pointed out before: In a business context, this [...]
Comment posted June 19, 2010 @ 7:32 pm
Wait, the punishment is that the FHA won't loan to them again. There's no fine or other penalty. This actually seems really smart/fair to me.–they're saying it's ok to strategically default, but we won't loan to you again.
Pingback posted June 19, 2010 @ 9:12 pm
[...] Lowrey writes about efforts underway in the House of Representatives to penalize those who “strategically default” on their home mortgages. I note as background something that others have pointed out before: In a business context, this [...]
Pingback posted June 20, 2010 @ 3:55 am
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 20, 2010 @ 6:38 am
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 20, 2010 @ 10:16 am
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 20, 2010 @ 4:40 pm
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 20, 2010 @ 5:43 pm
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 20, 2010 @ 11:36 pm
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 21, 2010 @ 12:01 am
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 21, 2010 @ 12:04 am
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 21, 2010 @ 12:25 am
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Comment posted June 21, 2010 @ 12:09 am
1. I am against strategic default.
2. Why are only INDIVIDUALS going to be penalized for strategic default? Don't B of A, Morgan Stanly, Trump etc. default on mortgages for strategic reasons as a matter of business policy? What should their penalties be?
Pingback posted June 21, 2010 @ 5:45 am
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 21, 2010 @ 9:49 am
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Comment posted June 22, 2010 @ 3:13 pm
What do you want them to do, spend 4 trillion dollars to pay down the principal balances? I have a better idea than just barring them from FHA loans: Make these deadbeats pay back every red cent that's lots on these houses plus interest.
Pingback posted June 22, 2010 @ 11:47 pm
[...] House Bill Penalizes Strategic Defaulters « The Washington Independent [...]
Pingback posted June 24, 2010 @ 1:57 pm
[...] Lowrey has a post on a new effort to penalize strategic [...]
Comment posted July 7, 2010 @ 10:01 am
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Comment posted July 21, 2010 @ 8:17 pm
My contract says I can default, how can the govt come in and say I can not?! Second, the govt program is terrible for help in refinancing a home! I have to pay a full point more than a traditional loan on an investment that is losing money AND I can only refi through my original lender…I cant shop the loan!? Yet if I was struggling or had a divorce then my bank will loosen their death grip on my interest rate? Give me a fair interest rate and I wont default! Our politicians need to get their hands out of the banks pocket and actually understand what they are voting on! How many people would have strategically defaulted if they could have gotten a loan at 3-4%…remember these same people are underwater 50-100K but are still willing to pay their debt just at a fair price!
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