October 19, 2025
“They’re Divorced. A 2% Mortgage is Keeping Them Together”
This relevant article appeared in the September 6, 2025 edition of the Wall Street Journal. Written by Dalvin Brown | Photographs by Michelle Bruzzese
A mortgage is binding together Ryan Hambry and Morgan Dickson well after the end of their marriage.
They finalized their divorce in April. He lives in a Cape Canaveral, Fla., beach bungalow. She lives in a 19-foot Airstream trailer in the yard. Their arrangement preserves the loan, which they refinanced at roughly 2% when rates were at rock-bottom levels in 2020. Now, rates are well above 6%, which, along with high home prices, would almost certainly lift the cost of moving for both of them.
She uses the house’s outdoor shower, usually after dark to maintain at least a little bit of distance. The kids split their nights between the house and “camping out” in the trailer. The exes hash out the weekly custody schedule in a shared Apple Note.
“The finances can work,” Hambry said. “The boundaries are harder.”
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.
It takes serious coordination, and even then, it often doesn’t work. Some exes who spoke with The Wall Street Journal said they run their homes like an Airbnb, with checkout lists for cleaning, groceries and linens. Others split the main house into distinct spaces with separate entrances.
Jennifer Job, 46, a digital strategist in Apex, N.C., said she and her ex are keeping their 3,000-square-foot home, which they bought with a 2.75% rate in 2020. They also share a $1,300 studio apartment for the parent not in the house.
They stock both places with duplicate toiletries and chargers. Job keeps a spare pair of glasses to avoid midweek retrievals. The studio is about a mile and a half away. Their 8-year-old daughter has visited, but she never stays the night there. They have nested for two years, deciding each July whether to continue for another year.
Divorces require lots of compromises, and nesting often adds even more.
“The way that you know it was a fair settlement is when both people are somewhat unhappy,” said New York family lawyer Sherri Sharma.
Dickson and Hambry, in Cape Canaveral, came up with their arrangement while separated. They considered three paths for the divorce: sell, buy out or nest.
Selling would free up the wealth in their home but force each of them to purchase at today’s high prices and rates, or navigate the vagaries of the rental market.
Having one buy out the other can mean refinancing into a higher-rate loan, said New York family lawyer Marilyn Chinitz. For Dickson and Hambry, a buyout would require refinancing into his name on one income, giving up the low-rate loan for a new one as high as 7%.
For Dickson, renting a small apartment at $1,500 to $1,800 a month would mean breaking the bank for a place her 4- and 5-year-old children couldn’t grow into.
Nesting preserved the cheap mortgage and the kids’ routines, and it used the Airstream they already owned.
Living in the trailer for seven months, so far, has saved at least $10,000, before utilities and fees, she said. She plugs into Hambry’s power and sewer, and pays $100 for utilities. Propane for the Airstream costs about $100 every six months.
They split the larger costs of child care and tuition for a hybrid home-school program. She left a career at a hospital to be a stay-at-home mom. Now she works at a boutique and earns extra income babysitting in the main house for a handful of hours a week.
The home they bought for about $265,000 in 2017 would be costly to replace now, they said. A nearby vacant lot is listed for around $440,000, a reminder of why they are staying put. Since 2017, home prices in the Cape Canaveral area have grown faster than the national average, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Dickson also owns a 50-by-125-foot lot next door. Hambry agreed to make six years of mortgage payments on it to compensate her for putting inheritance money into the house. She plans to build on the next-door lot, and he plans to stay in the bungalow.
“Two homes right next to each other, three blocks from the beach?” she said. “I mean, that’s how I would die happy, knowing my kids had that.”
Privacy considerations took longer to work out. Early on, they had one blowup over boundaries after Hambry walked outside during Dickson’s evening shower. Now when she showers, he avoids that side of the house and keeps the bedroom blinds shut.
“I’m not in her space all the time. She’s in mine more,” he said. Sometimes he feels as though they are still married, he said, because she is always around. “But then there’s clearly no intimacy and other parts of what a marriage is,” he said.
Still, they have dinner once a week as a family.
Dickson cooks at the main house. She runs laundry while Hambry, an aerospace engineer, is at work, then clears out before he returns.
He worries he could be held liable if a child is injured while she baby-sits in his house. When the Airstream’s air conditioner is broken, or there is a leak, he volunteers to fix it, though not always as quickly as she would like.
Their arrangement draws mixed reactions from friends and family. Some praise them for putting the children first. Most respond with versions of “hell, no,” Dickson said.
The children are adapting or at least going along with it, Hambry said. They sometimes say they miss the parent that isn’t with them at that moment, which encourages the adults to keep the handoffs predictable.
“We’re trying to still be a family,” she said, “just in a new shape.”
