Mortgage Foreclosures Are Increasing Is It a "Market Correction"?
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The least pleasant event anyone wants to experience, aside from death, is losing their home. Not to sound overly dramatic, but from personal experience, the foreclosure process oftentimes can make you wish you were dead. I fought foreclosure for years, then sold my home for exactly what I owed on the mortgage during the worst of the Covid crisis. With hindsight, it might have been better for me if I had just ridden out the foreclosure moratorium in place at the time, and then let the home be sold at auction.
I survived with the help of good friends, my pets and a tough law firm, which was able to correct, on my behalf, the illegalities of the “puppy mill” foreclosure process after the fact, win compensation and a bit of extra money from the foreclosing bank as punishment for violating the law.
But losing one’s home is indeed a traumatic experience. In fact, foreclosure rates high one the scale of traumatic life experiences and can leave lasting physical and emotional scars. At that is exactly what is happening today in our country.
As of February 2026, foreclosure rates have increased 20%, year over year. In 2025 and into the first quarter of 2026, over 400,000 U.S. homeowners went through the nightmare of foreclosure. The five states with the highest foreclosure rates are Indiana, South Carolina, Florida, Delaware and Illinois.
There are many valid, substantive reasons for the increase in foreclosures in the last 15 months: we are trapped in a declining economy with slowed hiring, rising costs for everything, including mortgage interest rates, home insurance, property taxes, HOA fees, utilities and home repairs that make keeping a home precarious at best. Making the situation worse is the elimination of the Affordable Care Act subsidies, which allowed low and middle income earners to purchase health care at semi-affordable prices. Now, yearly costs for health care premiums are estimated to total between $23,000—$40,000 for a family of four. The choice in 2026 for many Americans looks like it’s between keeping your home or buying health insurance.