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BenAfter Foreclosure Guide To Housing: It Ain’t Easy
After short selling my home last year, I faced a pretty big problem:
Where the crap am I gonna sleep?
While I avoided the house going to auction, I lost my place to stay. I was lucky enough to still have an office floor to sleep on, and a car that I stayed in a few times as well.
What about the people?
I keep reading about these billions of dollars getting written off by financial companies. What I don’t hear about so much is what’s happening to all the people involved in these loans gone bad. With thousands of family losing their homes…where are they ending up? (not to mention their pets?)
I had a heck of time finding a place to live after my two month “GAP” in housing. I was really quite frustrated with the process. So, here are a few lessons I learned about creative living situations and finding an apartment after a short sale or foreclosure. (more…)
I'm 300K in debt. Gulp. I'm 24 and day traded away a fortune. Now I'm trying to crawl back to zero. Why not subscribe to my RSS feed and join me on this journey. You can also subscribe via e-mail. I appreciate tips and feedback! ~ DebtKid
how many people does an inspection take?
Wow. That was really embarrassing.
Really…..embarrassing. I wasn’t expecting that at all.
I went to sleep for a few hours around 5:30am this morning, hoping to sleep about 4 hours, and then start the week off in the office. Around 8 though I’m awakened by footsteps outside the back of my deck.
I look out, and someone is walking around. Great, I think, and head back to a few more minutes of sleep. Then I see my real estate agent calling on my phone. Crap.
I pickup. “Hey, is the lockbox still outside?”
Me, “No, I took it in a month ago when you told me too”
Agent, “Well, the buyer is there to do an inspection, are you at the house?”
“Yes, give me 2 minutes, I’ll let them in”
I go downstairs….there ARE FOUR CARS IN MY DRIVEWAY! I crap you not, four cars, at least 5 five people waiting outside my house. I through on some close, someone rings the doorbell…
“I’ll be right there!” (I yell…not in a mean way, just a frustrated way)
I gather up my stuff. I’m double blocked in, two people move their cars….this is so not cool.
4 cars. 5 people.
I leave as fast as I can. This was not fun. I guess this is what happens when you do stupid stuff…hope the inspection goes well. Wish I had had a heads up on that happening! (Agent! What’s going on here? A simple e-mail anytime yesterday would have been nice…)
Alright, enough writing. I’m pissed off and I have a priority list of 15 things to get done today….
#1 get un pissed off….
foreclosure mail - what vultures send when you are losing your home
The last few weeks I’ve been bombarded with letters/postcards/fliers all offering to “help” me in my foreclosure situation. The sad part is that alot of people will get taken in by some of these sharks. I’m not saying all these are from scammers, but just reading the ad copy on some of them makes me cringe…
Some are outright hilarious, others so awful you wonder if the sender just might be losing their house next because there is no way anyone would respond. Some are sad, and some sport obvious and outright lies to get you to call them. But enough commentary, I’ll show my favorites in the post here and the rest after the jump (also here)…
Vulture Mail
This one is classic. The first line is the best…”We have selected you as a homeowner in need of financial assistance that we are ready to provide!” Wow.
I love the opening line on this one as well…and the closer, “lets beat the bank together!”
A “former” foreclosure vulture? This is one of THREE of the same letters I’ve received from this guy in the past month…..wow.
The rest…
rebuilding my life
The last few months have been a big change for me. My whole thought processes on money and wealth have been completely transformed. In good ways I believe. I’ve also been actively trying to revive my life outside of work. When I think about the last two years (when I was trading allot), I can’t remember many social situations…some, but not many. And definitely no intimate ones (intimate not in a sexual sense, but in a relational sense). So, I’m trying to work on this part of my life now. Now that I don’t have the time!
Making the effort
The truth is that my journey is just beginning here to pay back all the debt I owe. And I can’t live my life for the next who knows how many years in a bubble of just work. I’ll go nuts. As much as I love my business, it cannot nor should it sustain me as a whole person.
So…I am making more efforts to reach out to others, even when I don’t feel like talking about my situation. I think I can find a good balance of being intimate without going into huge detail about my nasty situation. I miss my friends from a few years ago, and I’m starting to reconnect with some of them, and it feels really good.
Tracking my Debt
I’ve yet to find a really great way (beyond excel spreadsheets, which is what I use at the moment) to track my debt in a nice, neat visual manner. There are just no good wordpress plugins that I’ve found on this. I may look into writing one if I can justify spending a few hours on something that could be a good motivational/tracker tool for me. If anyone has a good plugin or tool for this, let me know. It would have to track debts individually and output some sort of bar chart or nice chart.
The House
Still no updates here….haven’t heard if the buyers have agreed to the higher price that the bank came back with to approve the short sale. Good news is that I still have a place to live for another month before the move to the office.