If you were wealthy, you would never have to worry about making your mortgage payment. That may be true, but many wealthy homeowners are deciding not to pay their mortgages, and allowing the banks to foreclose.

The most galling part of this is that many of the wealthy homeowners stay in their homes, pay nothing, and the banks takes months or years before moving to foreclose. The homeowners call it "strategic default."

Fort Lauderdale "stop foreclosure" attorneys note that many wealthy homeowners go into strategic default when their properties lose hundreds of thousands - or millions - of dollars in value.

One in twelve mortgage debtors is seriously delinquent on their payments. Among wealthy homeowners with loans over a million dollars, that delinquency rate rises to one in seven.

One man who bought an ocean-view home for $1.385 million five years ago, now has a home worth less than $800,000. He decided, as a business decision, to stop paying the mortgage two years ago. The payments were $10,000 a month.

Ironically, the more you owe, the lesser the consequences. The man is still in his home. The reason is that banks are reluctant to foreclose on million-dollar homes. They are hard to sell, and they come with heavy costs for upkeep.

RealtyTrac reported 3.8 million foreclosures in the United States in 2010. There might have been more, but banks were too busy with the smaller homeowners to bother with the wealthy defaulters.

Source: CBS "Even More Millionaires Defaulting on Mortgages" 1/30/2011