Breaking Up is Hard to Do

Divorced Ryan Hambry and Morgan Dickson have dinner
together with their children at their Florida house once a week

The cliché about the economics of marriage--"two can live as cheaply as one"--remains true even though the marriage is over. Some divorced couples continue to live together because their housing costs would rise substantially if they were to sell their house with a low-interest mortgage.

For divorcing couples, there is a particularly tricky version of what housing professionals call the “lock-in effect,” where homeowners stay in place because they don’t want to give up their low rates. Across the housing market, the lock-in effect prevented almost two million home sales between mid-2022 and mid-2024, according to Federal Housing Finance Agency research. The number of people moving is significantly lower than it was before the pandemic, according to Bank of America.

Some ex-spouses are choosing to “nest,” an arrangement in which the kids remain in the family home and the parents rotate in and out. The practice has been around a long time, but it has gained popularity as the costs of moving have risen, according to family-law attorneys and mediators.

There are compelling short-term financial reasons for not cutting the cord completely, but keeping the family house under joint ownership will make it difficult to find other partners, relocate to other cities, and move on with their lives.