Because the lender says it is. Once you are behind in your mortgage you have no rights and no protections of the law. Once behind the lender is no longer subject to the law and may commit any act they wish against you.
There is an entire industry devoted to doing, in essence, nothing while those of us who want to innovate and improve peoples' lives, produce something tangible and useful, and live honestly, who play by the rules and assume (often wrongly) that success and advancement are based on merit, that compensation should bear at least a loose correlation to productivity - we're left out. We're not part of the "in crowd."
I view the entire field of finance with much contempt. I respect those who actually produce something useful - ideas, but esp. engineering and the hard sciences. Guess I'm weird.