More than 70,000 loans were at least 30 days past-due in the first three months of the year, including those in imminent danger of foreclosure, the Mortgage Bankers Association estimated yesterday. That's an increase of 70 percent from the first quarter of last year, the largest jump since figures were first kept in 1979.

Are you in that group? Get more information about foreclosure prevention from an earlier How-to Monday.

The good news: Maryland's share of loans with late payments remains lower than the all-time highs at the end of the 1990s and in the early part of this decade, when fraudulent property-flipping schemes in Baltimore raged.

On a related, bad-news note: The Associated Press reports that homeowner equity "has dropped to its lowest level since the end of World War II":

Homeowners' portion of equity slipped to 46.2 percent in the first quarter from a revised 47.5 percent in the previous quarter. That was the fifth consecutive quarter below the 50 percent mark, the Federal Reserve said yesterday. ...

At the end of March, nearly 8.5 million homeowners had negative or no equity in their homes, representing more than 16 percent of all homeowners with a mortgage, according to Moody's Economy.com chief economist Mark Zandi. By June 2009, he estimates, that will increase to 12.2 million, or almost one out of every four homeowners with a mortgage.