jingle-mail,

news media have begun to report that some homeowners have decided to walk away from their homes just because they have no equity and, consequently, don't want to make their mortgage payments even though they could afford to do so.

Not long ago, foreclosure was viewed as a shameful outcome of severe financial difficulties, but today, some homeowners seem almost proud of their decision to ditch their home and their mortgage payments. Consider Stephanie Valdez, a homeowner in Stockton, Calif., who told a "60 Minutes" correspondent that she and her husband saw no point in making the payments on their house because it was no longer worth as much as they had paid to buy it.

Such behavior isn't new, of course. Homeowners in the last real estate down cycle also signed over the deeds to their homes to their lenders in lieu of a protracted foreclosure process. But today, this so-called "deed-in-lieu" has become so much a part of the landscape that a new term, "jingle-mail," has been coined to describe those envelopes of house keys mailed back to lenders.

What's changed in this cycle, however, is that the negative consequences for walk-away homeowners have become so minimal that the decision to ditch a burdensome home and oversized mortgage seems to make a strange kind of good economic sense.