How Many Homeowners Are Not Meeting Their Obligations?

If I was one of these people I would want to stab myself in the eye – reading this also makes me want to stab myself in the eye.

According to new research from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management 26% of the record numbers of home mortgage defaults across the country are “strategic” — that is, calculated economic decisions to bail out of loans by owners who actually have the money to make the payments but can’t handle the negative equity they’re carrying caused by local property value declines.

Nationwide, according to data from Zillow.com, 22% of all homeowners were underwater, with mortgage debts that exceeded their home values, in the first quarter of 2009.

In some parts of California and Nevada, more than half of all households have negative equity. In a few localities, the size of the equity deficit is staggering: In the Salinas, Calif., metropolitan area, for example, the median equity for people who bought their homes in 2006, near the peak of the boom, is now a negative $214,305, according to the study.