[dedward]

At the risk of inflaming some - if you were buying the home, a paper loss in market value is irrelevant unless you are planning on selling the home during that time.

The real problem here is that we're not really talking about home ownership or buying a house - we're talking about taking out huge loans from banks and paying them off over decades, along with a ton of interest, and hoping that property values increase so we can trade up to something bigger and end up in exactly the same situation- rinse, repeat. The real problem is that we discuss "ownership" of homes when we don't really own them - the bank does.