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Nirvalica

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  7. how to remove headliner??

    in Interior / Exterior / Paint - Detailing, washing, waxing,tricks of the trade!

    Posted

    i've done it before. all you have to do is take the pins out and you may have to take off some of the side pannels off to get it down. and depending on the type of lights and what not you have you can just pop out the lights or you might have to do it when its half down. and your car might also have other things like the glasses holders and stuff like that which you would have to refer to owners manual or forum to find out how to get those down. just some helpfull advice.

    I would recommend buying a repair book for your model car. It'll tell you how to take off all the trim panels and everything.

  10. 4 18" ssd's

    in Subwoofers / Enclosures

    Posted

    ok ok ok i have 4 hdc3s dual 2 coppers and 4 bxi 2608ds....ill need 4 batts (thats a $1000) and 2 300 amp alts (thats another $1000) multiple runs of 0 gauge and box building material plus ill have to pay someone to build the box im looking at about $3000 id have to spend to get my hdc3's in and running happily....

    wut i want to do is spend this $1000 get the ssd 18's since they're already in a box and drop them in as i already have one of the amps hooked up and its 1 ohm stable n doesnt hurt my electrical i cant run those 4 18" hdc3s on 1 amp

    wut i want to know if its a good buy at $1000 i can just drop them in and press play thats not the same case with the hdc3s...

    im ready for bass_-_ sorry i dnt have time to make my post clearer im drivn right now

    Why can't you wire up all 4 HDC3's to the one amp? If they are dual 2 ohms, you can wire each sub in parallel to get each to 1 ohm, then wire two pairs in series to get 2 ohms, then wire those two pair in parallel to get 1 ohm final impedance. each sub will get 650wrms. No harm to any of your equipment, no money spent (except to build a box). I don't see a problem...

  14. Nirvalica's 95 Grand Cherokee, the "SAV"

    in Member Rides & Builds -- Show off your whip, Show off your System!

    Posted

    I didn't like how exposed the sub was. I don't want people looking in and seeing it, so I built a grill for it.

    DSCF0658.jpg

    DSCF0662.jpg

    DSCF0725.jpg

    DSCF0722.jpg

    Mids amp. Wiring looks a little like a rats nest, but its all under the seat and none of it is visible when the seats are down.

    DSCF0724.jpg

    Sub amp

    1007091534.jpg

    This is a picture of the ID's before I installed them.

    DSCF0718.jpg

    Tweeter in stock location

    DSCF0719.jpg

    With the cover on

    DSCF0736.jpg

    That's where the woofers are. I didn't feel like taking the door panels off for a picture, especially when I'm just going to be putting them in kick pods soon anyways. I'll get pictures of that up when it happens.

    DSCF0730.jpg

    Here's the kenwood

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    Bass knob location

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    I ran the wire for the USB into the ashtray, so that's where my flashdrive is. Out of view and out of the way, but still easily accessible.

    DSCF0738.jpg

    This is obviously the battery and wiring. Not the cleanest, but it works.

    DSCF0739.jpg

    Battery is just a Diehard Gold, nothing special

    DSCF0740.jpg

    It's the only battery I have in the car as well.

  15. Nirvalica's 95 Grand Cherokee, the "SAV"

    in Member Rides & Builds -- Show off your whip, Show off your System!

    Posted · Edited by Nirvalica

    Well, first off, my system is still evolving. I wouldn't say it's "finished", but for now, I guess you could say it is. I didn't really take any pictures while putting it all together. I always have the intentions to, but I just always forget once I'm in the zone. My goal was loud bass, but still keeping good SQ. I also wanted it to be a sort of stealthy install. It's tough to hide an 18" sub, so it can only be so stealthy. But looking at the car from the outside, you really can't tell what's in there.

    I call this the SAV, the Sub-aural Assault Vehicle. I just like that name lol

    If you can't tell by my sig, here's what I have in the car...

    head unit:Kenwood eXcelon KDC-X993

    This thing sounds great. One reason I bought it was for the time alignment. It really makes the soundstage much more realistic and balanced. I love the USB input; I just load all of my music on a flashdrive and use the HU to browse through the folders.

    Image Dynamics CTX Front dash Tweets

    CDT 6.5" CL-E6NEO Front door Mids

    Image Dynamics CTX 6.5" Rear door Midbass

    I got the Image Dynamic Components to put in the front doors/dash, but I only realized after wards that the woofers were too deep for my front doors. I tried a spacer, but that only made the speaker hit the inside of the door panel. I just gave up trying to make those fit and got the CDT slim mount neodymium 6.5" woofers. They fit great and sound pretty good, but not as good as the ID's did.

    Kicker ZX350.4

    Got this used for $150 and it works great. I sort of wish it had more then 60w per channel, but it works fine for me and sounds great.

    Knukonceptz SS Karma 4 channel 6m RCA

    I just got these recently. The cable is seems pretty rugged. I just wish the connector ends were a little shorter. I had a little clearance problem in the back of the HU. Just got some right angle adaptors from Radioshack and it works alright.

    Fi Q 18" w/ brushed aluminum dust cap

    7cu ft. ported box tuned to 28hz

    I love this sub. It gets pretty loud but sounds great doing it. The brushed aluminum looks great as well.

    Sundown SAZ-1000D

    This amp is built like a tank and it's size is perfect to fit under the rear seat. I'm surprised how much power you can get out of it with just a 4awg power input.

    Iraggi 240 amp Amputator Alt

    Big 3 in Monster 1/0awg

    First let me say that Dom was great to deal with as far as ordering and CS. After putting this in, which wasn't very difficult but just time consuming, I get very little to no voltage drop at idle. Lights barely dim (hardly noticeable) at idle with some heavy bass, and when driving you can't notice at all.

    Second Skin Damplifier Lite on roof and front doors

    I had to replace my headliner because the fabric was seperating from the foam after 15 years. While I did that, I figured it was a perfect opportunity to deaden my roof. I have nothing but good things to say about Ant and his product. It was a pleasure dealing with him. The deadening really helped with the SQ inside the car. Before the deadener, my roof racks rattled so bad that you could hear it inside the car almost louder then the rest of the music. After the deadener, there is very little to no rattling at all from the roof racks.

    Soon to be adding:

    Q-logic 6.5" kick pods

    I have these pods on the way, so when I install, I will give my impressions and post pictures. I must say that the Billy Treadwell at Q-logic helped me out when I ordered the wrong color pods for my car. He was great and got it sorted out for me.

    So now to the pictures....

    So when I got the sub, UPS kind of fucked up...

    0915091343.jpg

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    0915091343b.jpg

    Luckily, it was alright, no damage.

    0915091354.jpg

    DSCF0643.jpg

    Here's a shot of the brushed aluminum logo

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    DSCF0648.jpg

    A little size comparison

    DSCF0649.jpg

    That's a quarter on the dustcap.

    DSCF0650.jpg

    0915092221.jpg

    Out with the old, in with the new.

    0915092221a.jpg

    0903091642.jpg

    This is the only shot I have of the box being built. I just propped all the pieces together for a "test fit". Home depot's saw was messed up, so nearly all of my pieces weren't square. I had to shave off a bunch of edges to square them, so my box probably ended up being slightly smaller then intended. It worked out in the end.

    0917091326.jpg

    box is finished and sub is in.

    DSCF0727.jpg

    DSCF0726.jpg

  18. Image Dynamics build

    in SQ - SOUND QUALITY

    Posted

    I have those speakers. They sound good. Just be sure you have the depth in your doors to mount them. They have a 2.75" mounting depth. It's not incredibly deep, but my front doors can't accomodate them. For SQ, I would recommend saving money on the back doors and just get a better ID pair of comps for the front.

  24. School Help

    in Off Topic - Random, Misc posts - the forum "Junk Drawer"

    Posted · Edited by Nirvalica

    Title:

    WHY DOING GOOD IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS.

    Authors:

    Murphy, Richard McGill

    Source:

    Fortune; 2/8/2010, Vol. 161 Issue 2, p90-95, 6p, 7 Color Photographs

    People:

    SEIDMAN, Dov

    Abstract:

    The article focuses on Dov Seidman, a management guru who advocates corporate virtue to many companies. A trained moral philosopher, he is a proponent of the theory that companies that "outbehave" their competitors ethically will generally outperform them financially. It discusses how companies including Pfitzer, Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble have employed Sideman's firm, LRN, to examine their corporate cultures, revise their codes of conduct, and train their employees about ethics.

    Full Text Word Count:

    2483

    ISSN:

    00158259

    Accession Number:

    48022653

    http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=48022653&site=ehost-live

    Database:

    Academic Search Premier

    Section: LEADERSHIP

    THE NEW GURU

    Dov Seidman is the hottest adviser on the corporate virtue circuit. His mission? Teach execs how to "outbehave" the competition

    AS UNEMPLOYMENT CREPT toward 10% last year, the drug giant Pfizer decided to do a good deed. For customers who had lost their jobs during 2009 and lacked prescription coverage, Pfizer would supply 70 of its name-brand drugs, from Lipitor to Viagra, free of charge for up to a year. For a company whose reputation has suffered some blemishes, including $2.3 billion in fines last year for improperly marketing drugs to doctors, the free-prescription program was well worth the cost. "We did it because we thought it was the right thing to do," says Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler. "But it was motivational for our employees and got a great response from customers. In the long run it will help our business."

    Virtue is supposed to be its own reward, but according to an emerging line of thought, it's profitable too. The Pfizer case is the kind of object lesson that permeates the gospel of Dov Seidman, a Los Angeles--based management guru who has become the hottest adviser on corporate virtue to Fortune 500 companies. A trained moral philosopher, Seidman has built a highly successful business on the theory that in today's wired and transparent global economy, companies that "outbehave" their competitors ethically will also tend to outperform them financially. More than 400 companies, including Pfizer, Wal-Mart, and Procter & Gamble, have hired Seidman's firm, LRN, to analyze their corporate cultures, rewrite their codes of conduct, and give ethical-compliance training to their employees. "Dov has done a terrific job of focusing companies on the question of how we behave," says Pfizer's Kindler. "He's right that how you behave and operate can be a real competitive advantage."

    Seidman's vision challenges conventional wisdom on many levels. Don't nice guys finish last? Since when has success in business been about goodness rather than earnings growth? To paraphrase the 13th-century management theorist Genghis Khan, isn't it more about crushing your competitors, seeing them fall at your feet, and taking their horses?

    The world has changed, Seidman argues, and winner-take-all strategies are obsolete. He contends that the rise of information technology has made good behavior more important because it has become increasingly hard to hide bad behavior. (Ask Wall Street.) In the days of "fortress capitalism," to use Seidman's term, companies had more ability to control what was said about them because it was more difficult for outsiders to understand what was happening inside the corporate walls. It's true that in recent years lax regulation and asset bubbles have allowed many corporate players to conceal their ethical shortcomings long enough to become obscenely rich. But in a world where disgruntled employees and unhappy customers can trash you globally in the time it takes to dash off a nasty blog posting or upload a cellphone video, it's becoming much harder to manage reputation the old-fashioned way, by hiding behind lawyers and crisis-management consultants. Ultimately, the only way to enjoy a good reputation is to earn it by living with integrity. "We can't control our stories," Seidman says. "We can control how we live our lives."

    Seidman laid out this vision in his bestselling 2007 book How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything … in Business (and in Life). The book made him a fixture on the global business-guru circuit, just in time for the moral crisis in capitalism over corporate greed and irresponsibility. Lately Seidman has debated ethics with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman at a Manhattan forum, addressed senior management teams at DuPont and PepsiCo, and signed on as a featured speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Friedman credits Seidman with inspiring some of the arguments in his 2008 bestseller, Hot, Flat and Crowded. "It's too bad Tiger Woods never read How," said Friedman, speaking from the sidelines of December's climate conference in Copenhagen. "Today people can see into your life farther, faster, and cheaper than ever before. Dov really helped me understand the behavioral implications of that: You are on Candid Camera, so be good."

    At 45 and sporting a California tan, Seidman doesn't look like the ethereal, pipe-chomping philosophers of popular lore. He resembles a younger, less pumped-up but equally relentless version of Arnold Schwarzenegger-picture the Terminator with a toothy grin and an expensive suit, quoting Aristotle and Kant while fielding nonstop calls on his BlackBerry. Not unlike Schwarzenegger, he moves fluidly between cultures and has achieved success in two very different realms. Seidman grew up in Israel and California, earned advanced degrees in philosophy and law, and then left academia for what he describes as "the applied ethics business," a field that he basically invented.

    As a child, Seidman struggled with acute dyslexia: Today he likes to tell audiences that the only two A's on his high school transcript were in auto repair and physical education. UCLA accepted him on condition that he enroll in remedial English courses. He worked his way through college by running a car-washing business (famous client: R&B singer Lionel Richie) and discovered an intellectual passion for moral philosophy, a field where he could excel because it rewarded the ability to master a conceptually challenging but relatively short reading list. He mastered the secular realm of rulemaking at Harvard Law School, but his ethics are also informed by the rabbinical tradition. Although Seidman is not a particularly devout Jew, he speaks fluent Hebrew and quotes the Talmud and Heraclitus with equal facility. "Our 3,000-year tradition has always recognized the infinite power of values," Seidman told the graduating class of Hebrew Union College in New York City when he received an honorary doctorate there last April.

    SEIDMAN LAUNCHED his company on a credit card in 1993, originally naming it Legal Research Network. His goal was to disrupt the legal services market by producing high-quality research, created by a network of independent experts and sold to corporate clients at a fixed price. LRN rapidly snagged a bunch of big-name clients, including MCI, DuPont, and Motorola. Seidman was featured in The American Lawyer magazine under the headline "Should You Be Afraid of This Man?" (Not really, as it turned out: LRN found a niche producing generic research, but it hardly displaced the profession's core business of dispensing personalized legal advice.)

    Over time, the company started selling legal-compliance services to corporations, which has evolved into an online education platform that now offers some 500 courses in more than 50 languages, on topics ranging from international corruption law to intellectual property, data protection, and environmental sustainability. LRN is one of the market leaders in a field that also includes many major law firms and all the big audit companies. The closely held firm has about 300 employees in the U.S., Europe, and India. Although LRN doesn't disclose revenues, Seidman says that the company is profitable. As it has grown, LRN has morphed from a business that helped companies understand and obey the law into one that aspires to help its clients create more ethical cultures. "Our business started as legal compliance," Seidman told me, "but I always thought that ethical inspiration was more important."

    The practice of corporate social responsibility has been on the rise for some time, evidenced most recently by the outpouring of U.S. corporate donations to support earthquake relief in Haiti. But Seidman believes it should go well beyond a company's CSR department. He makes an economic argument: Globalization has made it increasingly difficult for companies to differentiate themselves based on their products alone. Whatever your product or service might be, chances are that someone on the other side of the world can copy and sell it for less money. And if money is the only bond between you and your employees, they will quit the moment another firm offers them more cash. All the more important, then, for companies to compete at the level of behavior: crucially, how they treat customers and employees. "It's about who has the most trust in their relationships, and where most people want to work," Seidman told me. "This will be the soft currency of the 21st century."

    But can you really measure the impact of good behavior? One promising area of research is around trust. In his book Seidman discusses Jeffrey H. Dyer and Wujin Chu's landmark 2003 study of buyer/supplier relationships among eight major automakers in the U.S., Japan, and South Korea. Dyer and Chu found a strong correlation between trust and procurement costs. The least trusted buyers in the study incurred procurement costs that were five times higher than the costs of the most trusted buyers. Moreover, the least trusted companies in the study were also the least profitable. And companies that trusted each other were more likely to share valuable information like new product designs. "Trust between companies leads to more trust," Seidman says. "It sets off an upward spiral of cooperative, value-creating behaviors."

    Or consider the economic value of an apology. Several years ago the University of Michigan's hospital system embarked on a major revision of its medical malpractice policies. Departing from the standard industry practice of reflexively "denying and defending" most claims, doctors and hospital officials started sitting down with plaintiffs and their lawyers to discuss complaints prior to any formal litigation. In many of these meetings the doctors apologized directly to patients for any harm that their professional actions had caused. And while the hospitals continued to defend doctors vigorously if the evidence suggested that their care had met professional standards, they also instituted a policy of quickly settling meritorious claims. The results were concrete and dramatic: Between 1999 and 2006 malpractice claims against University of Michigan hospitals dropped by more than half, as did total malpractice litigation costs.

    For Seidman, the lesson is that the hospital system prospered by applying fundamental values of decency and transparency. "With the working atmosphere now free of retribution, doctors no longer have to duck and dodge to avoid the appearance of guilt when errors occur," he said in his book. "The culture of transparency … has brought error rates down throughout the hospital and measurably improved the quality of patient care."

    Seidman is obsessed with the classic philosopher's challenge: Live your principles. During our first conversation he explained his belief, grounded in Aristotelian ethics, that you earn trust by extending it to others. He drove the point home by handing me a confidential packet of information that he had distributed to LRN's board last spring, when the company went through a painful restructuring. Seidman laid off 63 employees, mainly in midlevel sales and marketing positions, while beefing up his Mumbai-based engineering team and hiring several senior executives, like former Altria chief compliance officer David Greenberg, who could help bring LRN's new message of ethical leadership to corporate C-suites. But how's this for an ethical dilemma: Hiring the likes of Greenberg, 55, effectively meant firing a number of junior employees who may have shared the commitment to LRN's mission but lacked Greenberg's intellectual chops and high-level corporate connections. The irony was not lost on the LRN workforce. Seidman's board packet included the full rationale for the restructuring along with numerous internal e-mails about the process, not all of them flattering to Seidman. One employee wrote, "In this horrible economic climate, LRN put 60+ people in the LRN family out of work … I struggle to understand how LRN is 'doing the right thing.'" Another staffer commented, "Overall, I think this has been handled well and shows a lot of foresight, intelligence, and courage. However, (only) one comment from Dov struck me as disingenuous: he said something like, 'We behave according to our values, even if something is not profitable.' I think it's important to be honest here-that one major motivation is to keep LRN profitable."

    This open debate is typical of life inside LRN's sleek industrial headquarters in Westwood, which feel less like a corporate office and more like a perpetual graduate seminar in the humanities. Conference rooms are all named after A-list philosophers (I attended several meetings in Aristotle, with occasional excursions down the hall to Wittgenstein). Everyone, down to junior software engineers and the company receptionist, appeared to have memorized How and internalized Seidman's moral vocabulary. I heard a great deal of talk about leadership frameworks, journeys of significance, outbehaving, outgreening, and progress along the cultural road from blind obedience to self-governance.

    Seidman's rhetoric floats high above the everyday imperative of just staying out of trouble, but it can lead to measurable results on that front. In partnership with LRN, chemical giant DuPont recently embarked on an ambitious effort to promote ethical behavior among its 60,000 global employees. The program, which includes a detailed culture assessment, live workshops, online education, and an anonymous hotline that employees can use to report problems, has borne early fruit: Confirmed ethical violations (which can include everything from bribing a foreign official to deliberately misstating records) dropped from 65 in 2008 to 54 in 2009. Those results are striking, DuPont general counsel Thomas Sager told me, given that DuPont has historically seen an uptick in violations for personal gain during tough economic times. "I think Dov is really onto something," Sager said. "When you energize a culture like that, people compete more effectively."

    In the future, LRN may find ways to mine its vast trove of data about organizational behavior in ways that will allow it to establish meaningful correlations between a company's ethical choices and its balance sheet. "LRN can change the world by convincing people that it's in their interest to do the right thing," says former senator Bill Bradley, a senior adviser to LRN. "That's how you create a brand that lasts forever rather than a few years."

    If so, Seidman could find himself playing in the M&A world, gathering fees for valuing companies based on their ethical cultures. If it became possible to put a price on virtue, even more companies might be compelled to take the high road. And Dov Seidman will have the best of both worlds: the philosopher who made a fortune.

    • FEEDBACK [email protected]

    Bio

    DOV SEIDMAN, 45

    HOME: LOS ANGELES

    JOB: ETHICS ENTREPRENEUR

    BIG BREAK: WROTE 2007 BESTSELLER

    How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything … in Business (and in Life)

    LOOKS LIKE: ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

    Currents: Debtor's Dilemma: Pay the Mortgage or Walk Away --- In Down Real-Estate Market, Homeowners Are Deciding to Abandon Their Loan Obligations Even if They Can Afford the Payments

    James R. Hagerty, Nick Timiraos. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Dec 17, 2009. pg. A.22

    Author(s): James R. Hagerty, Nick Timiraos

    Document types: News

    Publication title: Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Dec 17, 2009. pg. A.22

    Source type: Newspaper

    ISSN: 00999660

    ProQuest document ID: 1922649021

    Text Word Count 1291

    Document URL: http://skynet.ccm.edu:2075/pqdweb?did=1922649021&sid=1&Fmt=4&clientId=65&RQT=309&VName=PQD

    © 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

    PHOENIX -- Should I stay or should I go? That is the question more Americans are asking as the housing market continues to drag.

    In good times, it would have been unthinkable to stop paying the mortgage. But for Derek Figg, a 30-year-old software engineer, it now seems like the best option.

    Mr. Figg felt trapped in a home he bought two years ago in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe for $340,000. He still owes about $318,000 but figures the home's value has dropped to $230,000 or less. After agonizing over the pros and cons, he decided recently to stop making loan payments, even though he can afford them.

    Mr. Figg plans to rent an apartment nearby, saving about $700 a month.

    A growing number of people in Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada, where home prices have plunged, are considering what is known as a "strategic default," walking away from their mortgages not out of necessity but because they believe it is in their best financial interests.

    A standard mortgage-loan document reads, "I promise to pay" the amount borrowed plus interest, and some people say that promise should remain good even if it is no longer convenient.

    George Brenkert, a professor of business ethics at Georgetown University, says borrowers who can pay -- and weren't deceived by the lender about the nature of the loan -- have a moral responsibility to keep paying. It would be disastrous for the economy if Americans concluded they were free to walk away from such commitments, he says.

    Walking away isn't risk-free. A foreclosure stays on a consumer's credit record for seven years and can send a credit score (based on a scale of 300 to 850) plunging by as much as 160 points, according to Fair Isaac Corp., which provides tools for analyzing credit records. A lower credit score means auto and other loans are likely to come with much higher interest rates, and credit card issuers may charge more interest or refuse to issue a card.

    In addition, many states give lenders varying degrees of scope to seize bank deposits, cars or other assets of people who default on mortgages.

    Even so, in neighborhoods with high concentrations of foreclosures, "it's going to be really difficult to prevent a cascade effect" as one strategic default emboldens others to take that drastic step, says Paola Sapienza, a professor of finance at Northwestern University. A study by researchers at Northwestern and the University of Chicago found that as many as one in four defaults may be strategic.

    Driving this phenomenon is the rising number of households that are deeply "under water," owing much more than the current value of their homes. First American CoreLogic, a real-estate information company, estimates that 5.3 million U.S. households have mortgage balances at least 20% higher than their homes' value, and 2.2 million of those households are at least 50% under water. The problem is concentrated in Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan and Nevada.

    Josh Cotner, who owns an insurance agency, says his mortgage balance is about $100,000 more than the market value of his home in Gilbert, Ariz. Mr. Cotner could rent a bigger home nearby for $600 a month, far below the $1,655 he now pays on his mortgage, home insurance and property tax. He says he recently stopped making mortgage payments because his lender wouldn't help him reduce the principal on his loan under a federal program in which he believes he is qualified to participate. Given the sometimes lengthy legal process of foreclosure, he may be able to stay in the home for at least another nine months without making any payments.

    Banks warn they may get tough with strategic defaulters by pursuing legal claims on a borrower's other assets. "We will try to reduce people's payments if they have a hardship," says Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. "But we have a financial responsibility to get people to pay what they owe if they can afford it."

    Steven Olson, a loan officer and roof installer in Roseville, Minn., defaulted in 2007 on a plot of land in Florida he had bought as an investment. "I thought I could move on with my life," he says. But the lender, RBC Bank, a subsidiary of Royal Bank of Canada, sued him, seeking to make him pay more than $400,000 to the bank to cover its losses on the loan. Mr. Olson has hired a Florida lawyer, Roy Oppenheim, to resist the claim. An RBC spokesman declined to comment.

    States where lenders generally can pursue such legal claims include Florida and Nevada but not California and Arizona, where laws generally prohibit lenders from pursuing other assets of mortgage borrowers. A new Nevada law will protect many borrowers from these judgments if they bought a home for their own use after Sept. 30, 2009.

    Another risk for defaulters is that banks could sell the rights to pursue claims to collection agencies or other firms, which could then dun the borrowers for up to 20 years after a foreclosure. Such threats appear to deter some borrowers. A recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond found that under-water borrowers were 20% more likely to default in a state where mortgage lenders can't pursue claims on other assets than in those where they can.

    Brent White, an associate law professor at the University of Arizona who has written about this issue, says homeowners should make the decision on whether to keep paying based on their own interests, "unclouded by unnecessary guilt or shame." He says borrowers can take a cue from lenders that "ruthlessly seek to maximize profits or minimize losses irrespective of concerns of morality or social responsibility."

    But it isn't just a matter of the borrower's personal interest, says John Courson, chief executive of the Mortgage Bankers Association, a trade group. Defaults hurt neighborhoods by lowering property values, he says, adding: "What about the message they will send to their family and their kids and their friends?"

    In Mesa, another suburb of Phoenix, low prices are helping to draw buyers who may walk away from other homes. Christina Delapp bought a house out of foreclosure in July for $49,000 in cash. She says she will stop paying the mortgage on another home she still owns in Tempe if she can't sell in the next few months for more than the $312,000 that she owes.

    Ms. Delapp, who has been jobless for 18 months, says that the new home is part of her survival strategy. "I feel very fortunate," she says. "Regardless of what happens to my credit, we've managed to put together the best safety plan that I possibly could."

    Mr. Figg says that deciding to default on his loan was "the toughest decision I ever made." He worried that if he ever loses his job he would be marooned in a home that he couldn't sell for enough to pay off his loan, limiting his ability to find work in other parts of the country: "I couldn't move up. I couldn't move down. I couldn't move out of the city. It was a very claustrophobic situation."

    By moving to an apartment, Mr. Figg expects to lower his costs by about $700 a month. He plans to put that into his savings account and says he is willing to rent for the next five years or so.

    Lenders are guilty of having "manipulated" the housing market during the boom by accepting dubious appraisals, Mr. Figg says. "When I weighed everything," he says, "I was able to sleep at night."

    I don't know if those are of any help, I just thought the titles were interesting.

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