Are our personal finance problems our responsibility, or are we the victims of dishonest lenders?

Borrowers are ultimately responsibile for what they borrow. I know some were pushed to take out larger mortages by "brokers" but these people were salesmen not financial advisors. You signed the promisory note saying you would pay.

It is not so much dishonesty of lenders as unwisdom of lenders.

Lenders have been willing to lend when we did not have a confident means of repaying under likely situations.

We were basically wise to have borrowed to get into a hot real estate market, on the assumption that we would be able to continue to borrow at rates we could support. But we were not well advised as to how high our cost of borrowing could go. If we had looked back in history, it was quite a while since those rates had been here.

What people failed to do was look at how the rental vacancy rate was rising, and so we failed to anticipate that housing prices would drop when rental vacancy rises. How did we miss those indicators? I know that my son and DIL were discussing buying but became concerned about rising vacancy rates. They are still renting, and at lower rentals.

We do have to look at what market saturation may do to us.