Negative Equity

*sigh*

According to Zillow, the real estate tracking website, the prices of the houses in my town have fallen 14.4% in the last year. This means that our house is worth about $75,000 dollars less than we paid for it.

If we wanted to move, we couldn't. Which we don't, but you never know what tomorrow will bring.

We live in a lovely town in a beautiful part of the US. It's a typical New England town, with old houses that are pale coloured with cedar shake sidings and pretty gardens. It has a thriving town centre and a politically motivated populace who turn out for town meetings in large numbers. It's an aspirational community, somewhere you might see and think 'Ooo, I'd like to live there'.

We ended up here largely by mistake. Sean was and is working in Stamford, a city on the edge of both Connecticut and New York State. We talked about it before we came but we came to the conclusion that moving from a village into a city was too much of a jump, especially for Imogen who was 6 at the time and struggling even in a village school. So, with our rental allowance in hand, we looked at all the places we could afford and discovered that the nearest we could get to Stamford was here in Ridgefield, for the money. The problem with this area is that it's a dormitory for NYC. It's a bit like Surrey with Surrey-like prices.

We liked the town. We loved the school. So, when our rental contract was up, we looked to buy into the town. So, we bought a house. At the top of the market, or thereabouts.

So here we are, like hundreds of thousands of families across the world, in negative equity. But, we're in a rather unique position. We have two houses as we kept our cottage in Essex and have been renting it out for the last year. It is NOT in negative equity; in fact there's still some equity in it! If the worst came to the very, very worst, we could just up sticks and flee with tail between legs back to Blighty.

The lack of communication between countries with regard to credit is abysmal. Our credit score in the UK is amazing. We've always had credit and we've always paid it off. When we've had troubles, we've told our creditors immediately and arranged a payment scheme that suits both parties. When we came here, NONE of that came with us. We've had to build our credit score again, even though the main credit score companies here are the same ones as at home. It's taken four long years to create a credit score that actually allows us to run a reasonably priced mortgage. BUT, this works both ways. We can walk away from the house, the mortgage and ALL our credit here and it will have zero effect on our credit score at home.

We could never come back to the US though. Not even for a holiday! So it's not a real option. But it helps me sleep at night...