Buy a house, pay the monthly mortgage , watch your home’s value grow, and eventually sell it and fund your retirement dreams. It seemed to be the natural order of things until the bubble burst. For older homeowners, the new order of things is to either sell your home at a huge loss or stay put and hope things will get better before you’re too old and frail to have any retirement dreams left. For recent homeowners, there is no dream.

But there is a nightmare: Buy a house at an inflated value, pay a teaser mortgage until you can’t afford it, watch your home’s value fall like a rock, and then sink with that rock as you either default, renegotiate your loan, or sink further underwater each month. Renting never looked so good.

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