In an exhaustive and highly researched article in the Business Insider today, Keith Jurow makes the argument that the true number of people who will walk away from their mortgage is under counted and will increase dramatically soon.
Conventional wisdom now puts these “strategic defaulters” at around 12% of the defaulted mortgages. But Jurow points out some very scary charts that show that guess may be way off. Why? because as one chart shows, the higher the credit score … the higher the default rate. In other words, some mortgagees know that the time to get out is when their credit is still good.
