It sounds like a small thing, but I'm glad just to see an article which doesn't just assume that people who are underwater were foolish or reckless buying a house in the first place.  I bought well within what I could afford in 2001, and routinely paid down extra principal every month.  Now that I am married and have a small child, I'd like to move someplace bigger, nicer, and closer to the rest of my family.<p>Only thing is, according to the real estate agents, if I'm really lucky selling my house will just cover what remains on the mortgage.  If I'm not lucky, selling the house could easily cost us $20,000.  Crazily, the most likely reason for that to happen wouldn't be that we couldn't find someone to buy the house for what we'd like to sell it for -- it would be that we couldn't find a lender to appraise it for that much.<p>Personally, I haven't sussed out the moral implications of just giving the bank the house instead of paying back the loan.  On the one hand, it's hard to see how the bank could complain: yeah, they might be getting a house valued at $N in lieu of $N + $20,000, but they also got 8.5 years of interest on it, too, which probably amounted to around $45,000.  On the other hand is the notion that implicit in our loan contract was the idea that we would pay it off if humanly possible; that allowed the bank to lend us the money for less than would have otherwise been possible.  I don't know how to balance those two things.