Diary of a Creative Investment deal pt5

Are we upset over this….? You bet we are, but that’s not your fault. Disappointed? Yes, but, we have done everything right as far as we are concerned. The funny part is. Is that we tried so hard NOT to get in this position. I mean Who’d of thought that our house would have dropped so much in value, in such a short time? We always tried to keep our debt to less than ½ of what we owed on our home. Thinking that if things got to this point, it would be a simple thing to either refinance, sell or take some action, that would help us keep it or at least get out of it. When we took out this equity line (which is the MAIN reason we are in this position) our home was appraised at $236K. With what we owed on the 1st, even if we took all of the $75K they allowed us on the 2nd, we would still have had over $80K equity.

We live a pretty simple life, no big elaborate vaca’s, nor do we drive big fancy, expensive cars or own a house full of Fancy electronic equipment like 60” LCD TV’s. We are home bodies, happy to stay home, work on the yard, rent a movie on weekends and relax. I own a 30 year old Chinook RV and a little aluminum boat that I use to go fishing 4-5 times a year. We do enjoy camping and just getting away from it all.

The money we did take, was put towards the house, which we thought would only INCREASE, it’s value. We bought the house used ourselves. It needed some updating and such when we moved in. We painted it throughout, replaced the carpet and put in ceramic tile, that made the house much nicer. The home did not have a swamp Box, which we have always had so we installed a new one on the roof, eventually replacing it with the new Master Cool, we just put on last year. This has saved us an enormous amount on our electric bill. As time went on, the air unit that was already 20 years old went out and we had to replace it. The old wood fence was falling down and we replaced it with the block wall with the RV gate. The garage was getting rather crowed so we added on the 14X20 Tuff shed. We recently started our latest project, to add a patio on the front and adding additional driveway space. Things that people normally do on their HOME!

We were both working FT, at good positions we’d held for many years, and really had NO problem paying down the debt. As I mentioned earlier, we have not used that equity line for a year, made steady payments, sometimes  throwing an extra couple hundred on the payment to bring it down. Then BOOM, the shit started to hit the Fan, about the 1st part of 2008. Home values started dropping. My wife lost her job and went without working the 1st 8 months of 2008. This ate into our saving a lot, keeping up on things. During this time she was not working, is when MY back started giving me problems and I went out on Medical leave. My eldest son graduated from High School, got his drivers license and started to attend ASU, another couple added expenses. He had a good job, but was laid off 8 months later and ended up back here at home.

These added expenses, Medical for me, my son coming home, and finally Teri’s loss of her job in May, and my going onto Long Term Disability, just hit us like a ton of Bricks. We’d spent most of our savings trying to stay above water, the previous year and NOW just have nothing to fall back on. I do have my 401K, but I just cannot bring myself to using it to stay in the home for now. We decided it would be better just to move out, get into something we can afford with the income we have, rather than attempting to just put OFF the inevitable, Foreclosure and Bankruptcy and being left with NOTHING. So I guess what it boils down to is, We end up being one of those statistics, (among,  Hundreds of thousands) Due to this economic downturn.

We feel fortunate actually. I mean there are so many people out there that have NOTHING. No place to go and are left in the streets and with thousands of dollars of DEBT.. We’ve been married for 33 years, come July 7th, been through many hard times. This was NOT what we expected for our Anniversary, I tell ya…LOL. Knowing this was coming, we recently took a trip to Vegas for our anniversary. 3 days to fall back, regroup and talked about what to do. We figured the kids are old enough to understand what’s happening. Came home talked to them about it and here we are.