A 50-year mortgage would mean you get 20 more years to pay off the house. It also means you’d have 20 more years of paying interest, and also earning less equity.

High interest rates have spurred the resurgence of adjustable-rate mortgages. But ARMs are a little different from what you may remember.

With mortgage rates below 6.5%, lots of recent buyers are deciding to refinance. But there hasn’t been a similar increase in prospective buyers entering the market.

“When you get a fixed-rate mortgage, it's like buying insurance against inflation, and you're paying for that insurance over the whole life of the mortgage,” one expert told us. 

The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has a number of advantages for homeowners and investors. But it wasn’t always the norm.

Over the past three decades, the share of homeowners ages 65 to 79 with a mortgage rose from 24% to 41%.

Median property taxes in the U.S. rose by an average of more than 10% between 2021 and 2023, according to an analysis by LendingTree. More than half of homeowners with a mortgage are paying more than $3,000 a year.

A California assemblyman is looking to change that.

The lawsuit alleged that, in the early days of the pandemic, Wells Fargo put hundreds of thousands of mortgages into forbearance — sometimes without the borrowers even knowing it or asking for it.

And their amount of debt is also on the rise. That’s pushing more households into the ranks of the financially precarious.