Yahoo Life Videos
Marriage ends in divorce… and foreclosure: ‘We didn’t have assets to split. We had debt to split.’
Jenny D., a public information officer, thought she and her now ex-husband were buying a house they could afford when they moved from the Midwest to a suburb outside of New York City.“We thought we were making an investment,” Jenny tells Yahoo Life.But between a job loss and growing family, the pair found themselves “kind of underwater” and living paycheck to paycheck, with mounting credit card debt and neglected mortgage payments.“My biggest money mistake was probably assuming that I was always going to make or have the amount of money that I thought I would,” Jenny says.“It wasn’t like we ever thought we bit off more than we could chew,” she recalls. “It just was that life happened, and then income stopped coming in and it was like, ‘OK, wait a minute. We’re living way beyond our means here. How are we gonna fix this?’”They stopped making mortgage payments, and by the time the bank foreclosed on their home, their total debt — between the mortgage and credit cards — amounted to $550,000. Jenny says it was “horribly embarrassing” and that she felt too much shame to talk about it — even with her husband.
