Don't put mortgage in the wrong hands

Q: I just finished moving, with my husband and three kids, into an apartment, after owning our own home for more than 15 years. I have no idea how we ended up here. I'm a well-educated psychologist and my husband has worked for the same company for 20 years.

Years ago, when we divided up our household duties, he took the bills and finances and I took all the kids' doctor appointments and arranged extracurricular activities.

A couple of years ago we took out an equity line of credit and started to do some long-needed repairs and upgrades to the house. And everything was just fine, or so I thought, until about three months ago, when I came home and found a notice of default taped to my front door! My husband completely stopped making the mortgage payments.

He hadn't lost his job or anything, and he says he doesn't know where all that money went. But by the time I got that notice, we were so far behind I couldn't catch up and we lost our house. I am very confused, embarrassed and depressed. Where did this go haywire?

A: Really, this was not your fault, my dear. I'm sure you know this, and so does your husband -- who really should come up with a far more compelling explanation of the disappearance of all that cash than "I don't know."

(In fact, there might be another disaster coming down the pike if you don't locate and staunch the money hemorrhage; I've had clients and acquaintances in similar situations discover that their significant other had a drug problem, a gambling addiction, and -- in one particularly bizarre case -- another family out of state, when large sums of dough chronically came up missing over an extended period of time.)

Trusting your husband to pay the mortgage, while not something every woman would do, certainly does not fall under the category of reckless or negligent behavior.

But the questions of whether something was your fault and whether you could have prevented it are totally different issues. ...CONTINUED

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