Falling on hard times? Turns out the way to get out of your massive house payments you agreed to cause you don’t know how to deal with money and live beyond you means is to burn your house down!

Insurance fraud investigators are actually preparing for more arsons by cash-strapped homeowners trying to avoid foreclosures and ballooning monthly payments as the subprime mortgage crisis deepens.

Falling home values and tighter lending are making it difficult for many people to finance their way out of trouble. More than $50 billion in adjustable-rate mortgages were reset last month, thus intensifying the financial crunch on homeowners, says the coalition’s Executive Director Dennis Jay.

Suspected mortgage-related home arsons already have jumped 50 percent above the 2006 rate in California, though the numbers are still relatively small, the insurance department says.