Walk Away From Your Mortgage?

The Way We Live Now - Walk Away From Your Mortgage! - NYTimes.com:
"John Courson, president and C.E.O. of the Mortgage Bankers Association, recently told The Wall Street Journal that homeowners who default on their mortgages should think about the “message” they will send to “their family and their kids and their friends.” Courson was implying that homeowners — record numbers of whom continue to default — have a responsibility to make good. He wasn’t referring to the people who have no choice, who can’t afford their payments. He was speaking about the rising number of folks who are voluntarily choosing not to pay.
Businesses — in particular Wall Street banks — make such calculations routinely. Morgan Stanley recently decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. A Morgan Stanley fund purchased the buildings at the height of the boom, and their value has plunged. Nobody has said Morgan Stanley is immoral — perhaps because no one assumed it was moral to begin with. But the average American, as if sprung from some Franklinesque mythology, is supposed to honor his debts, or so says the mortgage industry as well as government officials."

This is a very interesting article on The New Morality.
Usually Jingle Mail is a subject that gets more discussion in the blogsphere than the Main Stream Media, so I was surprised that the Times ran an article on the subject. It is truly is a moral issue, but who is the immoral one, the bank or the home owner? Since most Boomers are Old School and have worked their entire lives to pay off their mortgages, it would be interesting to hear their thoughts on the subject.

Below is an embedded commentary from The Business Insider on the same article, the comments are very interesting.

The Debit Card Game

Visa, Using Fees To Dominate a Market - NYTimes.com: 
"Every day, millions of Americans stand at store checkout counters and make a seemingly random decision: after swiping their debit card, they choose whether to punch in a code, or to sign their name.
It is a pointless distinction to most consumers, since the price is the same either way. But behind the scenes, billions of dollars are at stake.
When you sign a debit card receipt at a large retailer, the store pays your bank an average of 75 cents for every $100 spent, more than twice as much as when you punch in a four-digit code."

Even at my age, I find you can learn something new.

I switched from Credit Cards to one Debit Card many years ago. I got tired of the fees charged to both me and the merchants, and all the other problems associated with them. So I was quite surprised when I read this article about how all the fees are still there, only now they are being paid by the merchants and the banks. As the article points out we are talking big bucks here.

I will never understand why the merchants don't just give discounts to cash customers and save themselves some money. That way they would also have some leverage with the banks and card companies over rates, now they seem to have nothing to bargain with.

Update: The NYT article seems to be making the rounds among bargain hunter blogs. Sue Stock's News and Observer consumer blog has a post entitled  The Deal On Debit Cards. It has some interesting observations on the subject, so give Sue some traffic and take a look at what she has to say.

Mayo Clinic says Adios to Medicare Patients

Mayo Clinic in Arizona to Stop Treating Some Medicare Patients - Bloomberg.com:
"Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) -- The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little.
More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare, the government’s largest health-insurance program, will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, said Michael Yardley, a Mayo spokesman. The decision, which Yardley called a two-year pilot project, won’t affect other Mayo facilities in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota."

The reason I'm posting another article about the Mayo Clinic refusing to take Medicare patients, is because the source of the article is Bloomberg and not just a local paper like The Arizona Republic and The News and Observer (NC).

Read it and weep, this is the future of Medicare.
One can only assume that the Health Care Reform bill, no mater what shape it morphs into, will make health care for the elderly worse by siphoning off 1/2 a Trillion from Medicare in order to pay for the monstrosity they call Reform.
I'm hoping the story starts to draw some national attention. As I pointed out in my Nov. 20, 2009 post entitled  Mayo Clinic Opting Out of Medicare  this is the beginning of a trend, and if the Main Stream Media picks up on this there will be "political hell to pay." The Bloomberg article is dated 12/31/09 making the timing a boon for the proponents of HCR. I scoured the online versions of the MSM outlets today, but the only reference I found was Fox's Gretta Van Susteren's blog  GretaWire and it was quite a small blurb, although the comments were interesting. One of the commentators claimed that Mayo has been doing this in Florida since 2002, but I haven't been able to substantiate it as fact yet.
We'll have to wait and see what happens. I hope I'm wrong but my feeling is that no one will notice that a prestigious institution like Mayo Clinic is refusing Medicare patients.