Buying a house is likely the biggest and most important purchase you'll make in your life. Unfortunately, most people can't afford to accomplish this long-standing goal these days—mortgage rates have been soaring since 2020, and taking out a mortgage has historically been the only way many people could begin considering homeownership. Without any feasible alternatives, spending 30-plus years paying off a mortgage with rising interest has become the norm.
What you may not know: Sometimes people need two mortgages to buy (or keep) a house. Home prices have become so high that it’s not uncommon to take out a second mortgage to finance the purchase. These second mortgages can become zombie mortgages, and they can haunt you if you're not careful.
A zombie mortgage is an old second mortgage that once seemed to be forgiven or written off by mortgage lenders, only to come back many years later and burden the homeowner with high interest rates or foreclosure.
The term is not, strictly speaking, perfectly accurate. A zombie mortgage has not died and then come back to life; it has just been inactive so long that it is effectively … undead.
Issuing second mortgages was especially popular during the housing bubble in the years before the Great Recession. The real estate market was jumpstarted, and many lenders leaned into predatory practices, like waiving down payments on houses and nudging buyers to take out second mortgages instead.
This was afforded by what's known as a piggyback mortgage, or an 80/20 mortgage system, where the first mortgage accounted for 80% of the debt and the second absorbed the leftover 20%. This system could only work because companies had padded these «deals» with interest rates
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