Negative equity

Negative equity occurs when the value of an asset used to secure a loan is less than the outstanding balance on the loan. In the United States, assets (particularly real estate, whose loans are mortgages) with negative equity are often referred to as being "underwater", and loans and borrowers with negative equity are said to be "upside down".

People (and companies) may also have negative equity, as reflected on their balance sheets.

In an asset

In the owner-occupied housing market, a fall in the market value of a mortgaged house or apartment/flat is the usual cause of negative equity. It may occur when the property owner obtains second-mortgage home-equity loans, causing the combined loans to exceed the home value, or simply because the original mortgage was too generous. If the borrower defaults, repossession and sale of the property by the lender will not raise enough cash to repay the amount outstanding, and the borrower will still be in debt as well as having lost the property. Some US states like California require lenders to choose between going after the borrower or taking repossession, but not both.

Upside Down (disambiguation)

Upside Down may refer to:

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Inverted question and exclamation marks

Inverted question (¿) and exclamation (¡) marks are punctuation marks used to begin interrogative and exclamatory sentences (or clauses), respectively, in written Spanish and sometimes also in languages which have cultural ties with Spanish, such as in older standards of Galician (now it is optional and not recommended), Catalan, or Waray-Waray. They can also be combined in several ways to express the combination of a question and surprise or disbelief. The initial marks are normally mirrored at the end of the sentence or clause by the common marks (?, !) used in most other languages. Unlike the ending marks, which are printed along the baseline of a sentence, the inverted marks (¿ and ¡) actually descend below the line.

Inverted marks were originally recommended by the Real Academia Española (Spanish Royal Academy) in 1754, and adopted gradually over the next century.

On computers, inverted marks are supported by various standards, including ISO-8859-1, Unicode, and HTML. They can be entered directly on keyboards designed for Spanish-speaking countries, or via alternative methods on other keyboards.