The New York Times | No Security in Homeland

"Lenders have aggressively encouraged home buyers to stretch in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. In the new world of flexible mortgage lending, it is possible to buy a $600,000 house with no down payment, and to pay only interest and nothing on the principal for years.

'The financing has changed everything,' said Humid Karat, a manager of Tarbell Realty's office in Anaheim. 'Ten years ago, if I offered to buy your house with a 100 percent loan, you would have called it 'creative financing' and thought I was crooked. Today, everybody wants a 100 percent loan.'"

Watch out for those interest-rate hikes!