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.
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