<prompt> Human: I never thought it would come to this. I never thought I would ever even consider doing this. Ive never made a late payment on anything in my life. The last time my credit was pulled the guy at the car dealership said Wow! Congratulations!, it was an 845. Im 32 years old. Here is my scenario. I bought a half a double in a small city in Pennsylvania when I was a single guy in October 2008. Thinking that housing prices had take a serious dive, that it was the time to buy. I paid 124,000 for my house. I was young and didnt have a huge budget but this worked for me. I am now married and have two children under the age of 4. Weve outgrown our house and frankly the school district in my neighborhood sucks. We need out. We listed the house March 31st at 129,900, which I thought was high but the realtor thought that was the right price at the time so I went along with it happily, hoping to actually turn a profit. Every indication was that the market was coming back so, great! 6 months later, we havent had a single offer and only a handful of showings. Weve dropped the price twice and currently sit at 118,500. My wife and I have met with two realtors preparing to move on and discuss our options. The first realtor wanted to list the house around 100,000 and hope to get 90,000. The second realtor wanted to list at 90K and hoped to get 80K. I owe about 97K. The idea of bringing money to the table has always been abhorent to me but reality is starting to sink in. I could stomach bringing like 4K to get out of the house but wed be looking at bringing 25K to closing to sell if the house sold for 80K. That is absurd. So here I am, thinking fuck this whole thing. Ive always done things by the book and look where I am now. So am I wrong to keep my hard earned money and just let the house go? I can take the hit to my credit and my wife was never on the mortgage so the idea would be to put our new house in her name. Tell me where Im wrong.TL,DNR: Underwater in mortgage, need to move because of kids, bring 10s of thousands of s to closing to get out or just walk away from it?  <response>: If you can, you would probably benefit from taking it off the market for 6 months, and re-listing it in the spring with another realtor for your breakeven price or a little higher. In the mean time figure out what repairs could be done to increase the value or at least showability of the place. Best of luck to you! 