patrick.net

Twelve years later, little about my life remained the same. I’d left Alabama to take a job at The Wall Street Journal. I was no longer married. Pierre, the dog, had died of old age. But I was still sending mortgage payments each month to a bank in Alabama.

I would have sold the house long ago, and in fact I tried. But when the U.S. housing market collapsed in 2007, the property’s value fell far below the amount I borrowed to buy it.

Walking away was never an option. I’d signed papers promising to pay the money back and I intended to do so one way or another. In case my moral compass ever needed a shake, laws in Alabama, as in many states, allow lenders to pursue the difference between the mortgage debt on a property and what it fetches in a foreclosure sale.

For much of the past decade that number kept growing. At one point, it would have been nearly $70,000.