If it could happen to him, it's easy to see how it could happen to anyone. Long article but well worth the read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/magazine/17foreclosure-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rssMy Personal Credit Crisis By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
If there was anybody who should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, it was I. As an economics reporter for The New York Times, I have been the paper’s chief eyes and ears on the Federal Reserve for the past six years. I watched Alan Greenspan and his successor, Ben S. Bernanke, at close range. I wrote several early-warning articles in 2004 about the spike in go-go mortgages. Before that, I had a hand in covering the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Russia meltdown in 1998 and the dot-com collapse in 2000. I know a lot about the curveballs that the economy can throw at us.
***
Despite the obvious red flag of applying for a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell loan, I wasn’t paying that much for the money. The rate on my primary mortgage of $333,700 was a remarkably low 5.625 percent for the first five years, though my monthly payments would probably jump substantially after the fifth year. On top of that, I was paying a much higher rate of 8.5 percent on my “piggyback” loan for $80,300. Even so, I would be paying slightly more than $2,500 a month for the first five years. It would get expensive eventually, but I could worry about that later.
***
Meanwhile, neither of us was paying attention to how easy our bank had made it to build up debt. The key was the overdraft protection — more accurately described as “bounced-check loans.” Every time I overdrew my checking account by even a few dollars, the bank would tap my MasterCard for $100, helpfully deposit the cash in my account and charge me $10 for the privilege.
Our debt spiraled up faster than I had ever dreamed possible. Chase Bank had cold-called me to offer a “platinum” card with no interest charges for the first six months. I took them up on it and shifted $3,000 in debt from my old card onto the new Chase card. But instead of paying down the balance before the interest charges began, I let it balloon to $6,000. Chase had sent us blank checks that we could use to either pay bills or give ourselves cash advances. I dismissed them as a cheap trick to lure dimwits into borrowing more money. In March, I grabbed one of the checks and used it to pay down $1,000 on my more expensive credit card.
***
I felt foolish, ashamed and angry as I confessed to Bob. Why had I been trying to live a lifestyle that I couldn’t afford? Why had I tried to keep up the image of a conventional suburban family man, when nothing about my situation was conventional? How could I have glossed over the fact that we had been spending about $3,000 more than we were earning, month after month after month?
How could a person who wrote about economics for a living fall into the kind of credit-card trap that consumer groups had warned about for years?***
“I’m sorry, but our analysts have been backed up,” yet another Chase rep told me, even more politely than the previous one. She said each analyst had about 500 distressed borrowers to deal with, and it had been taking about five weeks for customers to get a direct response. The delays seemed to be getting longer.
I was actually beginning to feel sorry for Chase. It seemed to be so flooded with defaulting borrowers that it didn’t have time to foreclose on my house. Eight months after my last payment to the bank, I am still waiting for the ax to fall. 
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