I have three basic loves: cooking, writing, and doing some PHP coding. Of course, I can't cook or code on this blog, so I'll write. Sometime, I might write something funny, sometimes I write something not so funny. I hope you will enjoy reading thru the sometimes funny, sometimes not, experiences and thoughts of an everyday "common josie".
This is a time when it will not be so funny...
In order for you to understand our current situation, I will take you back in time to the year, 2006, to read what I wrote then...
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The last under-a-year months have provided my family with insight and knowledge into the world of mortgage law. This "insight and knowledge" was something we never wanted to have or desired. And now, for us, our war is not over as each and every day we venture onto different roads and paths in our efforts to stop our home from being foreclosed.
How we arrived at this road and what lead us down this path was this: Seven years ago my father died, very suddenly, of cancer. My mother sold her home and came to live with us. After several months of unsuccessfully trying to find a home that would accomodate all of us, we settled on buying land that was within our budget and build a home.
We were able to get a construction loan based on our income and stocks. (As a sidenote: today, May of 2009, we believe we should have never gotten the loan. Why? Because we now believe that our income alone should not have qualified us for the loan...but, we trusted the mortgage company who, by the way, was referred to us by the contractor. You will read more about him later on. We, at this point, had never heard of mortgage companies deliberately lending to consumers knowing that eventually they would foreclose. The stock market crashed, I lost my job, among a few other things and, so, here we are today.)
We hired a contractor (and yes we did our due diligence. However, unbeknownst to us, the State Licensing Contrator's Board doesn't list settlements...hmmm) who broke ground in the September 2000 and who also left us 6 months later with a framed, sheetrocked, leaky, roofed house that had several code violations and a second floor that could only be called "the roller coaster floor". So, off we go and hire a construction law attorney. In August of 2003, we reached a settlement and "the deal was done".
Even though many would say, "Hey, congratulations! You won the abritration lawsuit against your contractor!", what isn't well known are the hidden costs behind arbitration and lawsuits. Hidden costs, such as fixing construction defects, fixing code violations and gathering expert witness testimonies, that not only dive deep into your pockets but leave you, unknowingly, with no expectation of recovering your money. And, of course, this money has to be spent so that you can move in. But, you still have to pay the attorney fees (of course) and the court fees and the abitrator fees...oh, and don't forget that you're still left with a house that's not finished - that needs to be finished so that you can get an occupancy permit - and all the while you're still paying for the construction loan and the mortgage on your current home, which you're desperately trying to sell, still trying to make ends meet and finding that paying all the bills keeps getting harder and harder...and your once-perfect credit is now "gone with the wind".
For the next three years, we struggled to make our payments and eventually we fell behind, way behind. Attempts to talk to the mortgage company proved to be fruitless. Further more, at this point, I lost my job when the company closed down. Scrambling to prevent a foreclosure, we filed for bankcruptcy as our last hope in October of 2006 and hired an attorney to help us.
So, here we sit today, December, 2006 with a house we built for my mother and my family, on the verge of losing it all. If you're asking yourself why we haven't tried working with brokers and hard money lenders, we have - only to be lead down the proverbial "rosy path" and onto the icy roads of misguided hopes and broken promises.
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The next two years, and up through May of this year, proved to be the most stressful time of our lives. Our home was still not finished and we no longer had the money or the means to finish it. We wanted to finish our home and attempt to sell it. While the bankcruptcy delayed the foreclosure, while we attempted to communicate with the lender, hoping against hope that somehow, someone could and would help us, we finally found a way, a friend, who came to our aid. In June of 2008, we now had enough funds to finish our home and, most importantly, make payments on our mortgage for the next two years.
We contacted our attorney to advise him that, although we could now make payments for two years, we did not have enough money to bring the entire loan current. We were advised to "let sleeping dogs lie." So, we did.
For a brief time, in October of 2008, the dark and cloudy skies parted allowing us to enjoy a moment of sunshine, a moment of warmth.
My story continues over the next few posts.
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