Originally Posted by
Wrecktangle
Mathy, instead if looking at all the possibilities out there, you define the game. The game is: do I pay my mortgage given that the Net Present Value (NPV) of the property is negative in relation to the mortgages on it? BTW, none of your questions are related to the problem. As this game has several decision levels and as I cannot diagram them here and as it will take quite a bit of time to write this up in MSWord, I'll get that done this weekend and either try to post it here this weekend, or send it via e-mail to those who PM'd me.
In the environment today, you cannot motivate any bank to modify a loan so then you must forgo making monthly payments in order for them to play the game. So, the first thing you must worry about is the ding you'll take on your credit.
The top level of the decision tree has two decisions: Do I pay the mortgage or not given that I want the bank to modify my loan? Buried within this question is, can I get the bank to modify the loan given that they know that the NPV of the loan on the property is negative? In other words, there is some value to me in keeping the property since the NPV is negative, because if I were only to use the NPV, the obvious choice is strategic default. Given the value of the game, this is the dominant strategy if only money were involved. But given that the wife loves the house, moving costs, damage to credit and a few other things, I had to calc thru all the levels of the game to see it's value if I could get a modification to the loan.
When I work thru all the levels of the decision tree, it turns out that given all the dominant strategies buried within, they must modify or they lose well over 6 figures on this particular game. When I bounce the game value against my other alternatives it turned out that the value of the game said: stop payments, and then when offered, take the modification at a certain level (also found in the game).