Should You Keep Paying Your Mortgage?

A recent column in the San Francisco Chronicle discussed the possibility of homeowners deciding to stiff their lenders in order to qualify for one of the bailout programs that are currently being floated.

• Should you keep paying your mortgage? If you have significant equity in your home, absolutely. If you don't, it's getting harder to answer that question, especially when our government keeps giving people who owe more than their homes are worth so many reasons not to pay.

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• Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, predicts that many homeowners who have little or no equity will stop paying their mortgage and then reduce their income to get the biggest payment cut possible. They could stop working overtime or, if two spouses work, one could quit. After the modification, they could try to boost their income again.

• "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Schiff says. "People are going to feel like complete morons if they don't participate. The people getting punished are the ones who never made an irresponsible decision to buy a house they couldn't afford."

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• Schiff predicts that loan agents "will be cold-calling people trying to get them into it. Just like they encouraged people to overstate their income to get a bigger loan in the first place, now they will encourage them to understate their income to qualify for a smaller loan."

For more, see Are you an idiot to keep paying your mortgage?