<prompt> Human: My wife and I are considering buying our first house and although the prospect is exciting, its also a little scary. It seems like stories of people losing their houses are pretty common and many of the good deals I find on sites like Zillow are homes that are in foreclosure.My question is, how do people lose their houses? I know that the obvious answer is they dont make their payments and get behind on their mortgages but the mortgage estimates Ive seen online and heard about from friends and family dont seem outrageous at all, some are even less expensive than my apartments rent per month. Would the people who lost their homes not have been able to pay their rent as well?I know that no one chooses to lose their home and that life has a way of kicking all of us when were down. Layoffs, medical bills, divorce, etc. But is there some sort of hidden costs Im not seeing from home ownership aside from property taxes and maintenance costs? If I can comfortably pay my rent, can I comfortably pay my mortgage?Also, why didnt these people just sell their homes before losing them to re-coup some of the money they invested in them?Thanks.EDIT: Thanks for all the great replies everyone. This confirmed my suspicions that there is much more to the process than we had assumed. Lots of stuff to think about. I think weve decided to just continue to build out savings for now and re-visit the idea down the road.  <response>: Think perfect storm to lose income and house value at the same time. Also lack of financial cushion, such as savings, outside of the house equity.Turns out this is not as rare as you might expect. In a big economic downturn, you can both lose your job and your house can lose value at the same time. Throw in any other adversity such as medical issue, divorce, kid problems, and the perfect storm is created.If you have enough cash savings say an emergency fund you can pay your mortgage for some months while you try to find another job, but thats not guaranteed. Likewise selling the house before it is worth less than you paid for it seems like a good idea, but if you have a big loan and house prices drop fast enough that may not be possible.Lastly, there was a time when money was easy and people got huge loans bigger than they had any hope of ever repaying. They and their bankers were counting on the house prices to rise forever and make this shaky deal work. When the local housing bubbles collapsed, these excess loans and overpriced houses were no longer sustainable and houses were repossessed and loans were defaulted. A lot of the lost the house stories come from then. Money is a lot less loose now, maybe too much so, and house loans require better income to qualify and bigger down payments, so the risks are les than they used to be. 