We’ve all heard of people burning their mortgage note after making the last payment on their home loans. Heck, it’s a long-standing tradition.

But now there’s a new “tradition” coming from the so-called ‘mortgage crisis’: financially-struggling homeowners are setting their homes on fire when they can’t make their mortgage payments.

In what appears to be the latest symptom of the nation’s mortgage meltdown and credit crisis, insurers, law enforcement officials and state agencies nationwide report a jump in home and automobile fires in the last year believed to have been set by owners unable to pay their debts. The numbers are small, but they’re leading the insurance industry to scrutinize more closely what seem to be accidental blazes.

Apparently, this practice is seen primarily with people who opted for variable interest rates rather than locking in fixed-interested home loans. Faced with skyrocketing house payments while the cost of everything else is also going up, they simply can’t make the mortgage… so they opt to engage in fraud.

It boggles my mind. As I’ve written elsewhere, I have very little sympathy for people who got themselves into a financial mess by taking out mortgages with balloon payments or adjustable-rates.

To me that whole practice was nothing short of a foolish gamble, and as with any form of gambling the odds are stacked against you. Why, really, should it now be considered a ‘crisis’ to those of us who opted for a reasonable home loan at a fixed interest well within our budgets?

Even more proof of the gambler’s mindset these people have: they seem to be ignoring the fact that, after doing time for committing arson to get out of foreclosure they are still going to come out of jail owing on their mortgages.

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008, 11:14 am   |   In The News  |  RSS feed Comments and pings are currently closed.