It may be too early to put a final price tag on the amount of money American homeowners will lose because of the mortgage meltdown. Lots of different people have tried to do just that. I've decided to use the numbers from the Congressional Joint Economic Committee report, "The Subprime Lending Crisis," because it draws from the best of many of the economic analysis reports available.

The conclusion of this report is that American homeowners will lose $103,041,748,445 in value due to the mortgage meltdown between Q3 2007 and Q4 2009. About $70.8 billion dollars of those losses will be in direct losses of homes (foreclosures) and $32.2 billion will be in loses of property values of the homes in the hard hit neighborhoods. State governments will lose about $917 million dollars in property taxes during this period. While the losses won't all be fully realized in 2007, the root of these losses will all have begun in 2007 when the mortgage crisis was fully recognized.

The five hardest hit states are California ($23.8 billion in losses), Florida (total losses $12.2 billion in losses), New York ($9.5 billion in losses), New Jersey ($6.4 billion in losses), and Illinois ($5.4 billion). These totals include the direct loses from foreclosures, the direct loses in property values to foreclosures, indirect loses to neighborhoods and losses in state property taxes.

People who own homes in the hardest hit areas will be facing these loses for years to come. Right now no one knows for certain when the glut of homes on the market will begin to clear, but many believe we really won't see a turnaround until sometime in 2009.

Lita Epstein has written more than 20 books including the Complete Idiot's Guide to the Federal Reserve and The 250 Questions You Should Ask to Avoid Foreclosure.

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