Suck it up. Stop whining about your underwater mortgage, and stop thinking that renting is a better alternative to owning a home.
That’s the gist of Marc Roth’s latest column in BusinessWeek.
If you owe more on your mortgage than your home is worth, here are your basic options: You can sell it at a loss—maybe a big loss. You can strategically default, meaning you just stop paying the bills and let the place fall into foreclosure, with all the bad credit and ethical dilemmas that entails. Or you can hang in there, tough it out and wait for the market to rebound. What you can’t do is bitch about your predicament, says Roth:
It’s not that you’re not entitled to feel as if you got screwed. It’s just that other than me and maybe your mother, nobody else cares. Wake up and move on. What’s done is done. All that’s left is opportunity.
If, like many people burned by the real estate market, you’re thinking that renting is replacing owning as the American Dream, Roth says to think again:
If you want to pay rent money to someone else, it’s your prerogative. That person put 20% down, borrowed five times the amount at 5% interest, and uses your money to pay the principal, interest, and taxes on the place you’re living in. One day, maybe tomorrow, maybe three or five years from now, that house or apartment is going to go up in value.