19% of renting households missed a payment

[Brendan Burgess]

From RTE.ie

14% of owner-occupiers with a mortgage were unable to make mortgage repayments on time at least once in the previous 12 months, while 19% of all renting households failed to pay rent on time at last once, the survey also shows.

The figures are contained in a module on the effect of the economic downturn on households in the Central Statistics Office's quarterly national household survey for the third quarter of 2012.

It is astonishing that so much attention is paid to mortgage arrears due to the banks, but there is rarely mention of other people in much more serious financial difficulties e.g. the level of rent arrears and the level of mortgage arrears on local authority mortgages.

 

[Purple]

I think there’s a number of reasons why this hasn’t been focused on.
The banking crisis is seen as the root cause of our economic woes and the main issue we currently face, although clearly it isn’t.
Because of that perception debt that impacts on banks is high profile.
I would also suggest that since mortgage default is a new(ish) issue it is making the headlines whereas the issue of rent arrears is not.
Banks capture and publish their mortgage arrears statistics whereas there is no way hard and fast way of capturing and correlating statistics on rent arrears.
In the past, and in general, middle-income people had mortgages, poorer people and young people rented. It seems that if middle income people can’t pay their bills they are victims. If poor people can’t pay their bills they are lazy and should get a job etc.

Debt and default is the new pandemic. It’s not just people somewhere else catching it; now we all might get infected.
Basically, to paraphrase This post will be deleted if not edited immediately, the poor have always defaulted/ ran into arrears whereas now it’s everyone’s problem.