Homeowners in These States Carry the Most Mortgage Debt

Thursday, June 02, 2016

GoLocalWorcester Business Team

debt

Picture a home of your own, perhaps with a quintessential white-picket fence or a porch in the back with a view. Sound like the setting of a fairy tale? Homeownership might appear increasingly elusive to a large subset of the population, but a whopping $8.74 trillion of U.S. debt (72 percent) is mortgage-related, according to MarketWatch.

That sounds like a lot — and it is currently experiencing an uptick — but it represents a marked drop (of $1.3 trillion) from the highs leading up to the Great Recession. Since then, millennials have struggled to enter the buyer's market due to high levels of student loan debt, idle salaries and strict lending standards. Simultaneously, low home equity levels and boomerang kids have forced many baby boomers to defer downsizing their homes, according to Barclays.

The team at Credio wanted to see where Americans carry the most mortgage debt. To do this, they analyzed data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to calculate the mortgage debt per capita (amount attributable to all citizens) in all 50 states. They then ranked the list from lowest to highest.

This list features the 10 states with the largest mortgage burdens, along with the delinquency rate in the state (measured as the percent of mortgage debt that is at least 90 days delinquent).