Our Story,

we live in Northern Wisconsin in a beautiful house that was built primarily by my husband. This is a tourist area with a lot of lakes and a lot of big expensive vacation homes. Real estate in this area has just boomed in the last 10+ years or so. My husband is/was a contractor and I am a nurse. My husbands business was doing great. He had a good reputation and worked almost exclusively on multimillion dollar homes. He was making twice as much as me. Five years ago when we closed our loan on this house I just couldn’t believe it when they appraised our house at $400,000.00. Our loan was for $275,000, we had so much equity! I remember telling a friend of mine in confidence what our home was worth and feeling a “its just too good to be true” feeling in the pit of my stomach but my friend said “yeah, that’s real estate, be happy, just imagine what it will be worth in five years!”. So real estate continued to climb, we needed miscellaneous this and that to finish our house completely, including a big driveway job and we had all that equity so we took out a second mortgage for an additional $80,000. But it was okay, real estate was booming…. There was a time when we received multitudes of unsolicited calls from mortgage companies literally begging us to refinance our home! They went on and on about the great deals they had to offer, what amazing thing an interest only loan was, oh hindsight! We didn’t take any of these guys up on their offers but I remember so well all those phone calls.

Fast forward four years later, the economy goes downhill, construction starts to slow and my husband’s business is declining. We called Citimortgage in an effort to work out some kind of deal and they won’t even talk to us because we were current. But our finances were quickly heading downhill so we stopped paying our mortgage. Citimortgage finally talked to us after three months of no payments. I filled out all those pages and pages of the application and faxed them in and waited only to be told after one month that they didn’t have the paperwork. So I faxed it again, two weeks later again, and again, this went on for three months ( while we were paying the proposed lower payment, about 20% less than our regular payment). Finally Citimortgage explained that that fax machine received thousands of faxes each day and we needed to fax to a different #. So I did and we waited. My husbands business continued to decline. We decided that our home was our top priority so we stopped paying other bills like credit cards in order to pay for the house. His business got less and less and then finally this January dried up completely. We were still making the modified mortgage payment but just barely. We were really struggling to pay any other bills. We were still waiting for Citimortgage to decide if the loan mod would go through. At the end of January they sent us a letter stating that we made too much money for the loan mod! They would give us a chance to make changes to the paperwork to try to make it go through but as it stood they weren’t going to approve it. At this point we took a good long look at our life and decided that the house was just not worth it. In the four years since we built this house my husband has developed major back pain and takes pain medication to keep on working so we can pay the bills. Since the economic decline I am working one full time nursing job and picking up extra shifts at another facility. I can’t tell you how many nights I have laid awake trying to figure out how to make extra money or shuffle the money around to pay the bills. At the end of January I called YouWalkAway.com. In February we stopped paying the mortgage all together. It took them until the end of April to send us the letter telling us we were officially declined for the loan mod. Their reasons were the multiple dwellings on our property (must be that tree house my husband built for our kids!), and our poor credit rating (Imagine that!).

We received the summons in the end of July and according to the paperwork we will probably have to move sometime next spring. I like to joke to my husband that we are getting our share of the stimulus package by living here for free…

There is good and hope in all of this though. My husband is signed up for school full time starting in September. He just finished taking his first course this summer and got an A. He is planning to go to nursing school. I am so hopeful that he can find work that won’t destroy his body. We are in the process of extreme downsizing of our life. We are getting to a place where we can survive on my income. I feel almost guilty saying that because so many people are worse off than us. I am so grateful for my degree and my job. This is really making us take a long hard look at what we need and what we want. My motto has become  “I am doing the best I can and that is all I can do”. For the first time in our marriage we have a savings account and are really saving. I hope my kids come out of this a little less materialistic than their parents. I hope they see the value of education. This foreclosure is giving us a new start and hopefully we will come out of this stronger with a more solid future.

I am sleeping much better.

I have a suggestion: we would really appreciate a blog where people who have been through this give advice to others or tell their story about topics such as, how to tell family, friends, coworkers that you are losing your house, or how to approach a potential rental/landlord just to name a few. Thanks You Walk Away!