Making monthly mortgage payments is getting harder and harder for many homeowners.  As the AP recently reported, home foreclosures increased by 81% last year.  Thankfully, Philip Brewer at WiseBread.com suggests six possible options for homeowners who are having trouble making their monthly mortgage payments. One such possibility is renting the house out:

If you can rent the house for enough to cover the expenses of ownership, then you can move into a cheaper place and live there. In fact, even if the rent doesn’t quite cover the costs, you can still come out ahead, if you can find a place to live that’s enough cheaper (and reliable tenants).

Less drastic than that, you could rent out a room. That could make staying in the house as economical as moving someplace cheaper. In fact, there’s no need to stop at renting out just one room–if you have a big house, you could potentially rent out two or three. At the far extreme, you could move into the basement and then rent out the whole rest of the house to another family. Not what you had in mind when you bought it, but perhaps better than losing the place to foreclosure.

Most of the choices WiseBread offers aren’t ideal, but you shouldn’t expect a magic bullet to remedy such a serious problem.

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