Tell me how to get out of my underwater house

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think there might be some confusion about who's who here. I am the PP who hates the condo and plans to sell despite being underwater... not the OP, who doesn't seem to have posted recently.

Anonymous wrote:Sounds like you could rent it out and come closer to breaking even than having to bring $50-60K to the table (the $30-40K that you're underwater plus sales commissions). Have you considered renting it for a year or two while you move somewhere more amenable and then selling when the market recovers?

I have thought about it, and this is what we might have to do if the condo doesn't sell, but it would be a last resort. There are a few reasons I haven't seriously considered it:

--I could not be less interested in being a landlord.
--We'd probably still lose $400 a month.
--Values for these condos have declined significantly every year, with no sign yet of plateauing; for all I know, the unit will be worth even less a year from now.

I am also under the impression--and it may be inaccurate--that we would not be able to get another mortgage if we didn't sell the condo. But I'm seeing responses here that suggest people have gotten mortgages while still owning a previous property--anyone want to talk about how they did that?

(BTW, it's unlikely we'd have to bring as much as $60K to the table--the condo isn't worth enough for a $20K sales commission!)

I am the PP you quoted above. Yes, we built our new home in 2006 and didn't sell our old home until 2008. We looked into renting the place out, but based on Maryland restrictions, we would have had to put a couple thousand dollars into changes that we didn't want to make. For example, we had an atrium door that went from the family room to the deck plus a kitchen door that went out to the deck. Both had window panes. I was once broken into because someone knocked out the glass and reached in and unlocked the kitchen door gaining entry. So we had double barrel locks put in. Double barrel locks are not allowed to be let in Maryland because any rental has to have doors that a child tenant could unlock easily. Putting a thumb lock on the door was not a good option. The only other option would have been to replace both doors...and they were expensive doors. So, we ended up keeping the house until it sold. Part of the reason we could keep the house until it sold was that I only owed about $50K on the house. The mortgage payment was only about $600/month and a lot of that was equity in the house as most of the interest had been paid. We could afford the $600/month for a couple of years and I ended up making a profit of about $170K, netting me just over $250K at closing. However, when I got the original mortgage, I was single. When we built our new house, I was married and my DW made about the same as I did, doubling our income. The $50K with a perfect payment record for 11 years meant that they didn't worry about that when evaluating what we could borrow. Plus, we both had high credit scores and excellent payment records.

[Anonymous]

PP, thanks for your reply. Now I understand.

With negative equity in our place, it seems unlikely that we'd be able to get another mortgage until it sells... even though we make a little less than double what my husband did when he bought the place and we both have good credit. I hate to lose money, but as I've posted before, I've come to terms with it.