I hear the word "foreclosure" every day. On the news or in real life, "foreclosure" is very, very common word these days. Whenever I hear it, I wonder about the people who lost their houses. I know there is a person or a whole family behind every foreclosure. I know they shed tears and spent many an agonizing sleepless night. But they remain invisible.
I never hear someone say "I lost my house to foreclosure". So where are all these poor souls who must be going through very dark times? None of them seem to be talking. Where did they all go? I can only assume they are suffering in silence and isolation. I ache for them.
I have been able to hang on to the house that I live in -- despite teetering on the edge of foreclosure a couple of times in the past year. Though I have not lost my home, I DO know what foreclosure feels like up close and personal. I used to be a real estate investor. I rode the real estate market down with the recession. I may not have had to pack my belongings but I did lose SEVEN houses by surrendering a deed-in-lieu-of-foreclosure. It was agonizing. I can't imagine the horror if it had been my home. I hope I never get the lesson in what that feels like.
I had a conversation about financial strife with an attorney yesterday. He said to me "I hear stories like this three to five times a day. Everyone is struggling."
But no one is talking about it. We are all just suffering in silence. We aren't even talking to each other.
THAT is why I write this blog.
One of my co-workers went through foreclosure this summer and says she just can't talk about it anymore. She just can't stand to think about it anymore because she was just so helpless to do anything about it. The general consensus in our office is that Bank of America stole her home. They claimed payments were missing - then they found them. They claimed they didn't receive her faxes even though she had verbal and e-mail confirmation that they had done so. They claimed they were working on her refinancing while they were in the process of foreclosing and she still thought they were working with her when the sheriff showed up with the eviction notice. It makes me feel helpless and hopeless just thinking about it - I can't imagine how she got her kids ready for school and came to work while this was happening.
ReplyDeleteIt's looking like all my sweat making stuff for War Eagle will go to pay the nearly insufferably realtor who is working on our short sale. When we started talking, there was no such fee, she just brought it up about a week ago. Still, five years of carrying around a dead weight house that is losing value every 42 seconds, and I don't care what it takes to get it off our backs.
ReplyDeleteI hear a lot of the foreclosures are flippers and people that couldn't really afford houses in the first place, but I know a lot of them are people just stuck in the middle of the whole stinking mess, powerless to get banks to even pay any attention to creative and workable solutions.
blech.
Lots of good Open Salon posts. I think the comments on this one are very interesting: http://open.salon.com/blog/aim/2011/01/08/looking_foreclosure_in_the_face
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