You're a sucker if you pay your mortgage

It takes a year-and-a-half to foreclose on a delinquent homeowner:

Some 4.2 million mortgage borrowers are either seriously delinquent or have had their cases referred to lawyers to pursue foreclosure auctions, according to LPS Applied Analytics. Of those, two-thirds have made no payments at all for at least a year, and nearly one-third have gone more than two years.

These cases can go on and on. Nationwide, it takes an average of 565 days to foreclose on borrowers in default from their first missed payments to the final auction. In New York, the average is 800 days and in Florida, where the "robo-signing" issue is particularly combative, it's 807.

If they want to fight evictions hard, borrowers can remain in their homes even longer while their cases are being worked through.

Apparently, the housing bubble was a one-way bet for some home buyers. If prices went up forever, they got rich. If prices fell, they got to live rent-free for 18 months.