“I’m walking away from my house,” says Sakson, 57, who stopped making payments about six months ago on her home in Pennington, N.J. “The bank can have it.”
What Sakson did is called a strategic default, or a voluntary foreclosure, and it’s fast becoming a major challenge to the government’s $75 billion effort to keep distressed borrowers in their homes. Walking away from a mortgage is serious business — it can knock 100 points off your credit score and make you ineligible for a new mortgage for seven years. Yet, about 588,000 borrowers walked away from homes last year, double the number in 2007, according to a recent study by credit-scoring firm Experian and management consultants Oliver Wyman. While home prices are rising, the increases pale compared with overall drops in home prices since 2005 that threaten to push millions more homeowners into Sakson’s predicament, owing more than their homes are worth and seeing little chance of rebuilding equity soon.
More will walk away, which will hamper the housing recovery, reinforce lenders’ tight credit policies and drag on the economy’s recovery, economists say.
