Sweet sixteen

When you go into foreclosure, the mortgage holder stops dealing with you. Instead, you deal with a foreclosure company. This appears to be a bunch of lawyers too unskilled to chase ambulances, crammed into a windowless room somewhere in one of those states I never want to visit.

Our first contact with them was the notice taped to our front door. Two days later, the envelopes arrived.

I had to sign for them. There were 16 of them, and I had to sign 16 of those green USPS slips. The mail carrier couldn't meet my eyes. She knew exactly what they were.

Why were there 16? The foreclosure company was covering its bases. Some were addressed only to me, some only to my partner, some to both of us, and some to "Occupant." And they had been sent to both our current address (the one we're losing) as well as to the address of the rental house down the street where we'd lived for a year before buying this house. Given all the permutations of names and addresses meant 16 envelopes.

The contents were nearly identical. Each contained photocopies (no original documents) of an affidavit robo-stamped with some name. Not a signature, a stamp of a signature.

And each contained a "description" of the property under foreclosure. But half of them described the wrong property: acreage in a town a good 70 miles away.

Yes, indeed, we were dealing with a quality organization now!

Now where was I?

Sorry for the long break in posting. It's been a little nutty around here, what with all three of us getting respiratory infections.


So now we are in foreclosure. The reality of this hit home, so to speak, one Saturday morning. Our son took the dog out for a morning stroll and came back holding a piece of paper that had been taped on the door. It was our official notification of foreclosure. My partner and I sat at the kitchen table in silence, waiting, I think, for the other to say something to break the tension. Fortunately our son had wandered away,  more interested in the talking sports heads than the disaster looming over us.

Finally we started to talk to each other about what we could do. We had two problems, if we planned to stay in the house. Well, three.

1. Get the loan caught up.
2. Find a way to stay current.
3. Find a solution to the flooding problem that caused us to run through all of our reserves in the first place. The two "storms of the century" had flooded all of the bedrooms.

We knew we could get the loan caught up--several friends offered to loan us money. But we also knew we had little chance of paying them back in a timely manner. We might be able to stay current if we took in a boarder, but we were uncomfortable with this idea. It just seemed fraught with issues with a 12-year-old, a dog, four cats, and three birds in the house. And we knew any sort of permanent solution to the flooding would make our tiny scrap of a backyard unusable for anything else, and look ridiculous besides.

And it was clear that the house needed constant intensive care, more than we could provide. I am useless doing stuff around the house because I have no sense of balance and tire easily (I have MS), and my partner has been abusing her muscles and joints ever since we moved in here fixing things up.

We kept coming to the same conclusion: we were going to have to walk away.

Our regularly scheduled program...

So far, everything I've been writing here is stuff that happened in the past. Eventually I'll get caught up. But I wanted to interrupt our regularly scheduled program for some important information: why we aren't embarrassed about all of this anymore.

If my father was still alive, I know I would be hearing no end of criticism from him, and I would be weeping in the corner. He was a professional in the field of credit, and I can't even estimate how often he ranted about the evils of debt.

At first, we were embarrassed about our situation. We didn't tell anyone, not even our closest friends, and certainly not our families.

But as the foreclosure crisis became front page news, we realized that we were in good company. Our situation wasn't because of a personal failure, or lack of responsibility.We'd owned two houses before this one. We'd budgeted, stayed out of debt (except for the mortgage). Hearing the anger in the voices of friends here who were struggling to modify their loan helped us understand that

caught up in a situation truly out of our control. When we bought this house, we dipped pretty far into our reserves to fix it up. Then came the two floods, which wiped out our reserves entirely and also forced us to run up debt on two credit cards.