It is a snowball effect. For example, you skip a payment in May. Delinquency. Then you pay your regular monthly amount in June. However, the system of amortizing a mortgage works in such a way that your June amount is used to pay off the May debt, but then there is no money left for actually the June period payment itself. Delinquency – 2. If the next month you don’t pay 2 monthly amounts, it results in delinquency – 3, etc. Many borrowers are unaware of this effect and do not even know about the trouble until they see the delinquencies in the report. The only way to go from there is to get current with the mortgage payments and wait. Delinquency stays on the record for 7 years, but its negative power declines with time.