Walking Away From Million-Dollar Mortgages: "the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population"

More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.

By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.

Though it is hard to prove, the CoreLogic data suggest that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties, just as they would any sour investment.

“The rich are different: they are more ruthless,” said Sam Khater, CoreLogic’s senior economist.

This is a good article, but I don't like how they decided to represent the higher rate at which those with very expensive homes are defaulting on their mortgages.

One out of seven doesn't seem that much greater than one out of twelve but if you convert it to percent you see that over 14.29% of those with million dollar plus homes are defaulting on their mortgage compared to just 8.33% of those with loans below a million dollars.

Expressed as a percentage difference, that means the rich are defaulting on their homes at a rate 71.5% greater than the poor and middle class.

That's a shockingly high difference and it seems hard to believe that the rich are that much less capable of paying their mortgages than those with lower incomes which lends credence to CoreLogic's analysis. The rich are strategically defaulting whilst simultaneously the middle class and the poor are being told that it is immoral to do so.

Check my math:
1/7 = 0.14285 or 14.29%
1/12 = 0.08333 or 8.33%
(.1429-.0833)/.0833 = 0.7154 or 71.5% difference