Negative Net Worth
To say a person has negative equity is the same as to say they have "negative net worth" (where their liabilities exceed assets). One might come to have negative equity as a result of taking out a substantial, unsecured loan. For example, one might use a student loan to pursue higher education. Although education may increase the likelihood of higher future earnings, that potential is not a financial asset.
In the United States, student loans are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, and typically lenders provide student loans without requiring security. This stands in contrast to lenders requiring borrowers to have an equity stake in a comparably-sized real estate loan, as described above, secured by both a down payment and a mortgage. An explanation for the willingness of creditors to provide unsecured student loans is that, in a practical sense, American student loans are secured by the borrower's future earnings. This is so since creditors may legally garnish wages when a borrower defaults.
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Famous quotes containing the words negative, net and/or worth:
“Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression. The argument goes that, if people could see just how many of us there are, some in very important places, the negative stereotype would vanish overnight. ...It is far more realistic to suppose that, if the tenth of the population that is gay became visible tomorrow, the panic of the majority of people would inspire repressive legislation of a sort that would shock even the pessimists among us.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another—secret and passionate and intense—which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him.”
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“This mournful truth is ev’rywhere confessed,
Slow rises worth by poverty depressed.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)