What do you do if you owe more than your home is worth? You could simply walk away from the mortgage, as one professor suggests. But through a change in the works from the Obama administration, it should be slightly easier to get rid of the home without the stigma or complications of a foreclosure.
Companies & Industries
Is Walking Away from Your Mortgage the Smartest Thing You Can Do?
Forget about shame and guilt. Don’t worry about your credit score. If you owe way more than your home is worth, simply stop paying the mortgage and don’t feel bad about it, suggests a University of Arizona professor.
Black Friday: Also the Best Day to Buy Cars and Invest in CDs?
The biggest shopping day of the year is not only about snagging discounted toys and plasma HDTVs at the mall. Car dealers and online banks also want in on the action.
Poor, poor Robert Benmosche
The news that AIG CEO Robert Benmosche is thinking of leaving (now he says he’s staying; see update below) because he’s sick of dealing with those mean, mean federal regulators—especially the ones who want to cap his and his employees’ pay—raised two conflicting thoughts:
1) The federal government isn’t very good at running …
Ten Bizarre Theories on Saving and Spending
Poker teaches important lessons about saving and investing. Foreclosures are better than mortgage modification programs. Debit card overdraft fees are good for consumers. PMS is responsible for impulse purchases. There is no shortage of strange theories out there—and some of them are actually plausible.
Marketing smart of the day: Häagen-Dazs Five
With the economy still somewhat slow, companies probably don’t want to be going hog-wild on the R&D spending. Yet at the same time, with consumer dollars tight, companies likely also want to have flashy new products to dangle in front of people, to tempt them to spend what little cash they are shelling out at said company. What to do? …
Are you a fan?
James Dyson, the man who brought us the vacuum cleaner of the future, has a new device: the bladeless fan. It’s already getting rave reviews, despite its $300+ price tag. No one sent me one (I guess because all the freebies now go to people who only blog), so I can’t tell you how the thing blows, but I can at least offer up some videos. …
Don’t bank with a sports nut
After yesterday’s sad tale of the fall of Colonial Bancgroup founder and Auburn football dictator Bobby Lowder, now we have another sports/banking mess, this time from the Netherlands. From the NRC Handelsblad (translation, for once, theirs—I’m going to stick with only English-language links this time):
The Dutch central bank took
…
My sad Saturn farewell
The Cheapskate Blog’s Brad Tuttle writes that “the first new car I could truly call my own was a bare bones Saturn SL.” My first new car was a Saturn, too. Being no cheapskate, I splurged on an SL2. It was a 1992, just the second model year. I was living in Montgomery, Alabama, not all that far down the road from the Saturn factory …
It’s just that simple: Dell now wants to be like IBM
You probably know the bare-bones history of the personal computer: The business was IBM’s to dominate, but it decided to outsource the guts of the machine—the microprocessor and the operating system—to Intel and Microsoft. Those two companies sucked up most of the profits of the 1990s PC boom, while Dell became the dominant PC …
The Fed’s Wall Street pay fix
I was a little nonplussed this morning when I read the not-very-shocking WSJ article that came with the shocking headline, “Bankers Face Sweeping Curbs on Pay.” In the pre-Murdoch era that would have been a 600-word story on page A24, headlined “Fed Mulls Pay Guidelines.”
What’s happening is that the Federal Reserve is contemplating a …
Ten Ways to Get More Out of the Home You Want to Buy, Sell, or Rent
Has the real estate market hit bottom? Is it time to buy? Time to sell? Should you rent rather than buy? Should you rent the home you own instead of trying to sell it? No matter your housing needs and desires, here are some ideas that’ll help your cause.