Why I'm ANGRY

In my last post, I told you I was ANGRY, but I didn’t go into a lot of details as to why, other than the fact that I don’t think it is right.

When I say “right”, I mean literally moral.

I have a story where I could have been justified in walking away from our debt, or at least refinancing it to a lower amount. In fact, many people told us we should just walk away, rent a house for a few years, and then buy a house when it falls off of our credit.

You see, we bought our first house, a two bedroom, one bathroom house in 2004 for $320,000. Our plan was to live in it for a couple or few years and then sell it and use the equity to buy a bigger house. At the time of our purchase, we had a son and were pregnant with our second child. (We didn’t know at the time if we were having a boy or a girl. It was a girl.)

But a funny thing happened to our plan, with the recession that hit in 2007, it fell apart… miserably!

The house that we still owed hundreds of thousands of dollars on was suddenly only worth $90,000. We had no equity to use to purchase a bigger house. People were walking away from their homes left and right or refinancing for less than they owed, or shortselling their homes because “it wasn’t fair”.

Regardless of the market, when people bought their homes, they made a commitment to pay for it; not to only pay for it when they were happy and the market was good.

I was an ideal candidate to walk away from my mortgage. I was living with a son and a daughter in a 2 bedroom home, but we made a commitment and neither The Husband nor I could morally walk away from our home because we felt we had an obligation to pay our debts.

Instead of walking away like millions of people did, we made the best of a tough situation. We remodeled the house we were living in to make it more what we wanted. (We were unable to add on, but we remodeled every room in the house including the kitchen and bathroom, replaced all the windows, re-wired and re-plumbed the house, and made tons of smaller updates.)

By the time the market turned around, we were able to sell our home for a small profit (only $25000 more than we paid for it) and purchase a perfect-for-us-forever home with the proceeds. But we lived in that 2 bedroom house for 12.5 years because we made a moral obligation and commitment to pay for it, no matter how much it sucked or how unfair we thought it was.

That is why I am angry when people settle their debts for pennies on the dollar. They used the money, spent the money, enjoyed the nice things and nice trips and then don’t “think it’s fair” to have to pay it back. I have been on both sides of the equation and I feel like honoring your financial obligations is the right thing to do: even if it takes years, even if it’s hard, even if you don’t want to. I feel the same way about people griping about student loans. There are ways to make college cheaper, but if you choose to take out $80,000 for your private school education, then you don’t get to complain about having to pay it back!

I get angry when I hear people whining or complaining about paying back debt that they willingly took on. I get angry when they settle their debts for pennies on the dollar and then talk about “how much debt they paid off”. I get angry when people take the easy way out because getting out of debt is hard work. I’m not saying getting out of debt is easy, because it’s not. But if you got yourself into a mess, it’s your responsibility to then get yourself out of said mess!

*I also want to include I am not talking about people who lost their jobs and could not financially afford their homes/debts anymore. I’m frustrated with people who made a conscious choice to walk away because “it wasn’t fair”.