WSJ: Millions Are Facing Monthly Squeeze On House Payments [View All]

The Wall Street Journal

Millions Are Facing Monthly Squeeze On House Payments

Many Adjustable-Rate Loans, Popular in Recent Years, Will Soon Be Reset Higher

By JAMES R. HAGERTY
March 11, 2006; Page A1

Millions of Americans who stretched themselves financially to buy homes face a painful adjustment -- some could even lose their houses -- as monthly payments on adjustable-rate mortgages are reset higher.

In the hot housing market of recent years, many households took advantage of "affordability" mortgage loans -- heavily promoted by lenders -- that hold down payments for an initial period. Now the initial periods are coming to an end on many of these loans, leaving borrowers to face resets of their interest rates that can cause monthly payments to shoot up between 10% and 50%. More than $2 trillion of U.S. mortgage debt, or about a quarter of all mortgage loans outstanding, comes up for interest-rate resets in 2006 and 2007, estimates Moody's Economy.com, a research firm in West Chester, Pa.

Most borrowers will be able to cope with the coming wave of resets, in some cases by refinancing with new loans, lenders and mortgage industry analysts say. But some borrowers will have trouble meeting the higher payments and may be forced to sell their homes or could lose their homes to foreclosures. A recent study by First American Real Estate Solutions, a unit of title insurer First American Corp., projects that about one in eight households with adjustable-rate mortgages that originated in 2004 and 2005 will default on those loans.

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Still, a barrage of negative trends is making things tougher for already-strained borrowers. Interest rates are rising, which can increase the size of each mortgage reset and make refinancing more expensive. The housing market is cooling, making it harder to sell homes or build up a cushion of home equity. Regulators are pressing lenders to tighten their lending standards, which probably will make it more difficult for some people to qualify for refinancing. And some credit-card companies have recently started requiring higher minimum payments. Energy costs are up sharply, too, as are property taxes.

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