Escaping means being free, these people will not escape they will defer debt payment and the new terms will be less favourable. Sounds a bit like Greece, Portugal, Spain...but wait..that was there own stupid fault wasn't it. Not us, we wuz robbed.

oh yeah great idea right, people that purchased homes and lost money (while it was all over the news that home prices are dropping) can now transfer their negative equity to yet another home which will also lose its value and these foolish people can get into even more financial trouble. getting a tax break on a mortgage is not equal to nor does it cancel out the falling values of homes in NL the last couple of years. buying a home or transferring your debt in this extremely unstable market is not intelligent in any way.

Without controls this can just get them into more trouble. The negative equity should be paid off over a period of say no more than 5 years with a second facility, not linked to the mortgage.

I bought house for a 134k now WOZ is 126K. But I don't care as long as I don't try to sell it. You don't buy a house for a year. People saying "better rent" and I'm asking why? Why throw away money every month?
However this idea is just stupid.

@Jack: You should rent because you might move within 5-10 years, and you don't want to end up in a very deep hole because of a terrible bubble! You should also rent if you want to be able to purchase more house for less money. Finally, you should continue to rent if you believe that your job is at high risk over the next 3-5 years!

I had to leave the family home because of divorce. I could not afford the mortgage on the house, but my ex-husband could.
Rent on an 60m2 appartment at that time was the smae as a mortgage, so after tax releif the mortgage worked out a couple of hundred euros a month cheaper - on a limited budget it made more sense for me to buy. I did not have any choice about WHEN to buy as I needed somewhere to live that was affordable. Now I am in massive negative equity and even if I could afford a higher mortgage to buy a nice little house, I cannot move because I cannot sell my appartment.

Dear DN,

Are you not being a hypocrite for allowing comments only for news that you feel appropriate ?

@Kevin Say you pay 1000 euros a month rent. that means 1000 * 12 * 10 = 120,000 euros spent over 10 years - money lost forever and you'll never see a penny of that back. If you had bought your own house for say 200000, then at 1000 euros a month, you'd have paid back half the house. theoretically, that makes you richer by half a house and in case you get into financial trouble, you can sell the house and get half the value atleast.

We are a family of 4. We got this apartment in 2003 and we were clueless about mortgages, tax, etc this was our first home. We now have 2 children in a 2 bedroom place. We've learned but with the house issue we cannot afford to lower our asking price but we NEED a house esp now that we are wanting to complete our family with 1 more child. We have no room for this and our kids deserve a yard to play in! The longer this crisis drags out the more impossible our situation will become. Something has to change to get the market going again for all!

I agree with Nardner.. I'm sick of the dictatorship that is commenting on DN.. allow comments and let us say what we want. What skin is it off YOUR back?! I rarely comment anymore because of this!

[Editors' note: Unfortunately we have had to reduce the availability of comments for a variety of reasons. Some issues in particular lead to a large flow of responses which break our guidelines.

We do hope to have a new moderation system in place soon which will allow commenting on every story again.]

Yep, just pretend it doesn't exist. Covering up these problems only make them worse in the long term, it needs to be tackled now. I feel sorry for those in a negative equity situation though.

@Fatality: Not really. If the house costs 200K, after fees and interest you are up to about 230k in debt. If the price of your house declines by 20-30 pct you will sell it at a loss. -You might even sell the house and still owe money on the note. I might pay 120K for shelter, but you have paid almost twice that. And for what?