Boomer Mortgage Default Examined

Overstressed Boomers! Help send your local one-percenter on this tour...but help yourself at the same time! (Wiki Commons)

Remember when Other People’s Money―the play, the movie and the activity―was all the rage? OPM was the best sort of currency to use and lose. But it was limited, back then, to corporate raiders and other reptilian creatures of the putative one-percent.

Now…it’s the people’s turn. The REAL people. In the current economic climate, with people reduced to their “skill set” and their assets reduced to smoke and ash, it’s time for turnabout. After all, if you have nothing to lose because you’ve lost it all, why not just get free and let the phoney structures of modern commerce fall down around the ears of the oligarchs who raped you?

As a comment on Smirking Chimp recently explained it:

Car dealers are selling to bad credit customers, and you can pay by the week too. Even banks are investing in the pawn shops, which are lenders of last resort. And used furniture and appliance stores are selling the used furniture of dead baby boomers while rent-to-own and other businesses are adjusting to our new banana republic type economy for ordinary American people.

Dead baby boomers, arise!

Dead baby boomers. The very thing the youngest of the generations has been calling for, blaming the boomers for sucking all the juice out of the economy. It is difficult to deny, especially when such belly-walkers as George W. Bush and the Enron Club were baby boomers. But the fact is, the boomers were just as set up as everyone else. By whom? By the Greatest Generation, a ludicrous meme coined and profited from by Tom Brokaw, Talking-Head-in-Chief of his own generation, the tiny one between the so-called Greatest and the boomers. The generation that could waltz onto the world stage and grab anything it wanted, simply because―at whatever age―they had virtually no competition for the goodies of society appropriate to their age.

Brokaw brokers generational warfare

So there it is; a self-aggrandizing and none-too-sensitive member of the smallest generation in eons (Brokaw) elevates the most pampered generation in history (the WWII generation, or “greatest”) to godlike status in order to trash the largest generation ever, the boomers.

It’s beautiful. It lets the Brokaw contingent feel like king-makers; it lets the WWII generation strut around like they enjoyed the divine right of kings, and; it bashes the boomers with every barrel of every gun in existence from those wielded by the oldest WWII shirkers (in the US: in the UK, they really did fight and win a war) to the pop-guns of the youngest member of Generation Whine and everything in between.  No wonder there’s so much used furniture of dead boomers around.

Boomers: Bashed, or belly up? Your choice.

Here’s the solution for boomers: go belly up. Do it whenever you decide you’ve had enough of sucking up morsels left by the masters of the universe (a motley collection of bankers, politicians, old money inheritors, and so on) to stave off starvation for just one more day. Do it to save yourselves―something you’re not really good at, being much better at ending Southeast Asian wars, ending various forms of apartheid in the world or at least diminishing same―and maybe to save your kids.

How will going belly up help? 

• It’s honest; you ARE belly up, whether you realize it yet or not. When your retirement accounts lose 40 percent or more due to anyone’s efforts except yours, your house is worth less than the flimsy sticks it’s made of, and the government can pull the rug out of the most meaningless social benefit in the western world, Social Security, any time it wants―you ARE belly up.
• It makes sense. In cases such as this, using OPM is the most sensible thing you can do. You haven’t got any, anyway. So use theirs. How? Default on your upside-down mortgage…but buy some new cars first that might last until your credit is repaired (seven to ten years). Make sure you’ve got a paid-for bolt hole someplace…maybe the vacation house you bought and couldn’t afford so you rented it out. Take it back. Winterize it. Live frugally. 

 It would seem only right to abandon your mortgage. You can't pay it anyway. And the wealthy do it all the time. When they have a doggie investment, whether their own house or the company you work for, they divest without giving a second thought to the collateral damage.

Bush made it painful to dig out, but not impossible

You can, too. But there is one difference between you and them. They can also declare bankruptcy and get a clean slate. You can’t. Why? In a word, George W. Bush. His 2005 credit reform laws ensured that only corporations and wealthy people who use the law the way corporations do can get a clean slate. The rest of us? Serfs forever, as a bankruptcy discharge is now all but impossible for the working masses. The ONLY avenue left to exact any justice from the jackals who earned back their investment in your home during the first few years of usurious interest they charged you it to default. Walk away from your mortgage, from your home.

Yes, they have indeed added insult to injury.