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Let them all lose their homes and let the children suffer for their parents' mistakes too. This may be a national crisis but is not my crisis. My real estate problems happened a few years ago and my wife and I did not require any intervention from the government.
These people all knew what they were getting themselves in to. If you can show me a situation where someone's loan documents were fradulently altered, like in some of the cases in California, then perhaps their should be some accomodation, but people do not need to be protected from their own greed.
Here's my story...
I custom built a house in Newbury, Massachusetts in 1999 and my family moved in April 2000. By 2004, however, my wife wanted to move back closer to her job and her parents in Lynn so we started house shopping. The housing market in our area was hot and we never anticipated any problem selling our house for top dollar.
In Spring 2005 we found a house that we liked and put it under agreement. The sellers were looking to close in late August because they were waiting for a new unit in a local retirement community.
We still anticipated no issues, one of our neighbors in our upscale 55-house development had sold their house in April after about 2 months on the market. That seemed OK so we took our time and put the house on the market in July 2005.
We arranged bridge financing with our local bank and closed on the new house at the end of August 2005. My sons started school in the new town and we all commuted from our old house, about 20 miles north. By December we were starting to get a little nervous and we had now made our first 3 months of 2 mortgage payments. After doing some minor work to the new house (actually a 50+ year old house) we moved in on 12/31/05.
We let our listing expire at the end of '05 and took our house off the market for 10 weeks. We repainted some rooms after moving out and generally made the house like new. The house went back on the market with a different realtor in mid-February 2006. We had a buyer lined up by May, she actually rented the house for 3 months that summer but eventually had to back out of the sale after she could not sell her house in suburban Atlanta. So the house went back on the market and we continued to pay 2 mortgages.
In late September '06 I was laid off from my job of 9 years. I received a generous severance package and the job market was still pretty good so it was not a big worry. After 11 weeks off spent fishing and working around my 2 houses, I went back to work in early December. We had accepted an offer on the house in November and eventually closed on the sale just before Christmas 2006.
My wife and I are furious at any talk of bailouts for homeowners. We carried 2 mortgages for 15 months and spent over $60,000 in interest. We eventually sold our house for $80,000 less than its assessed value and $102,000 below our initial listing price.
Did we make a mistake? Absolutely! We should not have waited on putting our house on the market at the end of 2004 or early 2005. In our neighborhood in Newbury, the housing boom came to an abrupt halt in April 2005. But we did not ask for a government bailout, nor did we expect anything. We wiped out our savings and borrowed money from my in-laws to make it thru this period.
Now, a couple of years later, we have paid back the in-laws but we are still recovering from the lost equity and spent savings.
The lack of personal accountability that our elected officials seem to be promoting is dumbfounding to me. When did we all become "entitled"? Republican or Democrat, it does not matter, common sense seems to have taken a leave of absence everywhere.
Yes, my wife and I were not in the same situation as a tomato canning worker in Bakersfield, California who was the victim of predatory lenders and realtors. Our combined income is high and we knew what we were doing, we just had bad luck.
Anyone who knows me would say I am a nice guy and this is definitely a case where the nice guys are going to finish last.
- Gordon
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