Foreclosures, Donald Trump and the Percentage of Founding Fathers that Raped Their Slaves

James Altucher writes about foreclosure:

[Question: Should I] sell underwater condo at 70k loss or refinance and rent out? Both use all savings. .Rent w/o refi 800 loss/mo. Baby due, need bigger place.

ANSWER: This is simple to me: stop paying the mortgage. Have your baby. Live in your home. On average it takes 18 months for the bank to foreclose?

Two questions then:

- Isn’t this unethical?

- Won’t this destroy my credit?

The answer to both is “no”. You have a contract with the bank. The contract specifically states that when you don’t pay the mortgage they can take the house. So it has nothing to do with ethics. It’s a contract. The bank is not St. Peter at heaven’s gate weighing up your list of rights and wrongs. What’s right is to have savings and be stress-free when you deliver your baby.

As far as credit. It will effect your credit for awhile. But not forever. And there are services you can use to clean up credit no matter how bad it gets.

The key now: you’ve been stressing forever about this underwater property. The entire world feels your stress.

Stress kills. Bad credit doesn’t. The bank doesn’t. And your baby needs you.

Altucher on Donald Trump:

I do have a lot of admiration for a guy who can constantly go bankrupt and still end up shining like diamonds. The guy has figured how to ride the world as if it were the wildest horse and he can tame it...And let’s not forget one of the hardest investment decisions anyone has ever made: when NYC was going bankrupt he not only started buying up hotels (the Hyatt next to Grand Central was his first) but doing the unbelievable to them: getting rid of the old pre-war NYC stench in hotels and putting GOLD everywhere. The streets of heaven are paved with gold. And so are all of NYC buildings with the Trump name on them. Right when NYC was on the path to bankruptcy. Very brave.

And then when real estate crashed and many developers went bankrupt he managed to stay afloat. The question above asked about foreclosure. Trump has probably been foreclosed on everything and came out smelling like a rose. He defines the statement: when you owe the bank $200,000 they own you. When you owe the bank $2 billion, you own them.

I would never invest alongside him. But my guess is he’s a good businessman for himself and has managed to create the life he wanted to live.

There's much more from Altucher on re-energizing yourself, envy, dating, bad bosses, renting versus owning and the percentage of founding father's that raped their slaves, in an Altucher tweet fest Q & A here.