ROFLMAO! Thought you’d like that one! :-)

She was probably a former Bell Customer Service Rep. LMAO!

“So if we have no moral compunction against corporations walking away from a bad agreement (or filing bankruptcy) why do we need to claim that a home owner (who may have poor education, inadequate representation when signing the contract, or just greedy themselves) has a moral responsiblity to damage their, and their families, financial health by continuing to make payments on a bad investment when the law gives them the option of mailing back the keys.”

I would never expect greater moral responsibility from an individual than an organisation, and if this kind of get-out is written into contracts, then the parties signing those contracts have legal recourse to it. But it certainly is a recipe for chaos if contracts are ripped up left right and centre and anyone is allowed to walk away from something they signed up to (and that includes the financial houses or whoever provides the money to buy whatever is being bought). Just because they can and do walk away and wash their hands of their own personal nightmare doesn’t mean that nightmare handily disappears. It doesn’t, it’s still there and becomes someone else’s nightmare (increasingly the nation’s taxpayers). If the facility to throw in the towel without penalty was removed, perhaps more caution would be exercised on both sides?

When I was growing up, most people I knew did not own their houses. In fact, I think I and my sister were the first in our family to buy our own homes. It was something not to be considered unless you had a pile of money for a deposit in the first place (unlikely) and could obtain and then support a mortgage. In this country, Margaret Thatcher suddenly work up one morning and decided it was the “right” of every working man and woman to own their own home and promptly offered up the nation’s public housing at a discount to the residents. This achieved two things: 1) everyone suddenly thought it was their right to own a house and that it could be picked up at a discount, and 2) public housing was decimated and the population rising. Everyone born since then imagines home ownership to be somehow perfectly normal and outside the big cities with transient populations renting is a quite weird choice.

I don’t know how things moved from renting to buying in Canada and the US in large numbers, but that’s how it happened here. There is a perception of “rights” and a determination to set that right into motion. This has resulted in a vast swell of home ownership, and most recently through dodgy mortgages and a rash of buy to let speculators. Not sure what the percentage of home owners in the UK actually is, but it is pretty high compared with a lot of European countries. What if they all walked away and mailed their keys to the banks? (No, it probably wouldn’t make a lot of difference to the chaos we are already in!).

I think I am just saying that surely it is time to review all the behaviour we now see as normal, including our inflated ideas of “rights”, and the handy escape hatch that allows those in certain countries to hit the eject button with little or no personal loss to themselves, but which spreads the misery and adds to the general pool of loss felt by everyone.