Let’s all close our eyes and visualize opening our mailbox. Inside is an envelope with a set of keys in it. What sound would that envelope make? Would it…jingle? Yes, it would...and that’s why “jingle mail” is the term used to describe someone mailing their housekeys to the bank when they can’t afford their mortgage anymore. When someone does this, they’re basically giving up their house, and we wrote a little song to try and capture the feeling. Ahem.
Jingle mail
Gotta bail
Mailed our keys to the bank
We can’t pay
So we’re walking away
Our credit score’s gonna tank
As one might have gleaned from that soon-to-be chart-topper, using the jingle mail technique to get out of paying our mortgage is not ideal. We lose the house, we lose any equity we might have in it, and we also do some serious damage to our credit score. The only plus side to doing this is that it means we don’t have to go through the foreclosure process…but it’s still not a good thing to do. If we’re stressed about making our mortgage payments, there are other steps we should probably take first, like talking to our lender about a forbearance. Jingle mail should be our last resort, no matter how catchy the songs we might sing about it are.