A personal take on being under 40 and a Zillow statistic on underwater mortgages – Puget Sound Business Journal

More than 60 percent of Seattle residents under 40 years old are underwater on their mortgages. My husband and I are among them.

Last week, Seattle-area real estate website Zillow released a list of the country’s largest 100 metropolitan areas and the percentage of people in those cities who are under 40 and whose homes are worth less than they owe. There’s a pretty wide range, from about 28 percent in cities including Oklahoma City and Honolulu, to more than 81 percent in Las Vegas.

The implications of being underwater on a mortgage are so much greater than simply being unable to sell your house. Trust me.

When I married my husband, he already owned a condo in Maine that he bought at the height of the housing bubble, back when the conventional wisdom was, “Buy, don’t rent. At the very least, you’ll get your down payment back.”

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via A personal take on being under 40 and a Zillow statistic on underwater mortgages – Puget Sound Business Journal.