As long as everyone is playing the game with their own money then nobody should feel sorry for anybody. I don’t feel sorry when a gambler goes to Vegas and loses their shirt “going for it”, why should I feel sorry for the homeowner playing RE Lotto? Likewise, I don’t begrudge the property owners who, whether by genius or more likely by luck, have made a ton of money during this upswing.
Nobody could have foreseen in 2001 what the ultimate effects would be of giving all that credit away. This last swing has been unprecedented, but the potential downside has always been known.
By now, everyone should understand that it isn’t how much you make but how much you keep that counts in the end. The people who are now facing the ravages of foreclosure could have avoided it had they paid attention to what was going on, so no, I don’t feel sorry for them beyond what I would feel for anyone who’s having a tough time. They made one or more bad decisions and they are just as deserving of what follows as the people who gambled and won.
Let us not forget that the people who really make enough money to debt service their loans at the regular rate are not the people who now face foreclosure. That loss is mostly reserved for the people who never should have bought at those prices to begin with, and that includes a lot of people who lied on their loan applications. I not only don’t feel sorry for them, I think they and their mortgage brokers and in some cases their realty agents should face criminal prosecution for mortgage fraud.