Veeto,
As long as parents offering their home as a guarantee can really afford to cover the repayments should a pilot job not come about, I don't have a problem with this issue. Where I do have a problem is when they base their ability to meet repayments on the equity in their home. One only has to look at the crash of 1989 to see the dangers of presuming that property equity will always be there. As far as I can tell the signs are that the housing market is now beginning to follow a similar pattern to that in 1989, which is backed up by some City analysts predicting falls of 30-40% over the next few years. Relying on share values is probably even riskier as prices are highly susceptible to market forces, and when you see the massive corporate corruption within huge multinationals like Enron and Parmalat, it makes you wonder what may be going on in less well regulated companies.
At the end of the day they can gamble if they want to.
VC10 Rib22
