Granted, those folks made a stupid decision to buy the house in the first place, but when you’re looking at paying twice what the house is worth, PLUS the prospect that the house will never again see the value that you paid, PLUS the bank won’t do a short sale or work out some kind of deal with you, then why the hell not walk away?
What incentive is there to stay? Some sense of duty that you signed a contract with the bank? Lemme tell you, I’d get over that real quick. There’s a remedy in there for people who no longer want to continue in the contract. They’re simply making use of it. What’s the big deal?
When a contract is no longer a contract and you can just walk away from it, the economy suffers more than it already is suffering.
When people do this and add more homes to the list of homes that are for sale in a buyers market with no buyers, they only add to the problem of sinking house prices. The house price slump further reinforces itself due to contracts broken by those who choose to get out at someone else's expense.
This is not a victimless exercise...
The deal was for a loan to be given and for it to be repaid. The contract contains language for what happens after the promise is broken, but the fact remains that a scumbag broke a promise.
Your rationalization for a scumbag is spoken in used-car-salesman-ese and falls flat. Ugh.
It's not a "big deal", if one has no ethics, honesty, morality, integrity etc. No big deal at all.