It's 1991 and I just bought a house in Sarajevo, Bosnia with a typical mortgage through a retail bank. When the Bosnian War breaks out, the city is under siege for years. While most of my days are spent huddled inside concerned with food and gunfire, I haven't been able to send or receive any mail in months and the local bank branch is closed. The phones aren't working so I am ultimately unable to make any contact with the bank that issued my mortgage. Miraculously, I survive the war. As normalcy eventually sets in, would I be foreclosed on for missing years of mortgage payments? How were mortgage payments, outstanding debts, and other financial administration issues handled during and after the Bosnian War?
Edit: some clarification to perhaps help aid the answering:
assume I've sheltered in place, the house is not destroyed or abandoned.
assume I'm able to quickly resume mortgage payments, as well as make up some of the missed payments as soon as the war ends
One could reasonably answer this question with "well it depends on the terms of the mortgage" but as this is /r/askhistorians, I'm really asking what actually happened to most people in similar situations at this time. Answers describing mortgage debt during other 20th century wars may also be relevant.
In terms of most people, the situation you describe didn’t ever happen. Remember, Bosnia and the other post-Yugoslav states are coming out of a socialist system—private markets and the associated financial structures did not really exist in the way we think of them.
Individually owned dwellings were generally self financed, which means you saved up the money yourself or borrowed it from friends and family in very informal ways.
But most people in Sarajevo itself didn’t own their property, they lived in something called socially owned, which is essentially a form of co-op ownership in which the community owns itself. So not quite private, but not quite state owned.
To the extent people did take out loans, they were often subsidized low interest loans through banks controlled by their employers. High inflation rates before and into the war made these loans basically worthless, so repayment wasn’t really an issue. One pre-war anecdote from the history paper I link below is that a loan manager asked a guy if he could repay the loan quickly because it cost more to service the loan than they made in interest.
I’m sure some people had pre-war loans on the books still after the war, but they almost certainly weren’t a particularly significant factor in daily life.
So the major challenge after the war wasn’t sorting out the pre-war mortgage situations, but sorting out more fundamental questions of property rights. Record keeping hadnt been great under the socialist regime and then many of the records that did exist were destroyed during the war. Even beyond records, the basic legal structures didn’t exist or were incompatible with a market-based system.
Social ownership, for example, often privileged tenure and usage when establishing residency or usage rights. Essentially, living somewhere or using something gave you rights to it. But did you really “own” it, in the sense that it was an assst that you could sell? Or does the whole community still own it as part of the overall socially owned property? “Privatization” is tricky when arguably everyone already owns everything.
Heck, in the absence of a real functioning market, even basic price discovery was hard, so it was unclear what anything was even really worth in free market terms.
Sources:
Decent overview of post-war challenges: The Real Estate Market in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2000
History paper of Yugoslav housing, focusing on the moral framing of the raft of semi-legal construction projects before the collapse of socialism.