Below is a story from one of our readers:

“We have always paid our bills on time. We never had a late house payment with the 4 homes we owned. In the fall of 2009 my husband, daughter and I decided to move back “home” to PA as our mothers were widows there and we now had 5 grandchildren there and my older children and all our relatives were there. We looked for jobs in our hometown of Johnstown, PA and could not find any but were fortunate enough to find jobs in Pittsburgh. We put our home in DE on the market and friends of ours offered a rental home they had in Pittsburgh for a short term til we sold our house in DE. We thought it would only be a few months and we could buy another home.

When we accepted the new jobs, we had to take a $45,000 pay cut between my husband and I but we thought it was worth it to be closer to family and old friends. Our house payment in DE was almost $2000 / mth. After 6-7 months, we depleted our savings and with the pay cuts, we could not pay our mortgage payments in DE any longer. We had tried for all the programs – the modification program, the short sale, everything. But we found out many of those programs were not applicable to us since we were not living in the house. Our realtor told us then that the market had dropped so bad that we would not even be able to get what we owed on our house. We had no choice but to foreclose. We really did not want to stay renting the tiny house we were, with most of our stuff in storage, because we knew our credit rating would be ruined, but we had no choice. Little did we know that was the least of our problems.

Last summer after we decided we had to stay where we were until this all was over, my husband had back pain. He ended up going to the hospital for surgery to remove a lump. The lump ended up being cancer and after 3 surgeries and the removal of 4 ribs which left him paralyzed from the chest down, and 2 months later, I had to find another place to live that would be wheelchair accessible. Knowing again that our credit was ruined from not paying our mortgage, I decided to be very honest with apartment complexes. We were blessed that one would work with me. I had to put 2 months security deposit down instead of one. So within a year, we moved again. I had to have a place he could come home to.

Now we are in a one floor apartment (a far cry from our $285,000 home in DE) and are awaiting for this nightmare to be over. We still get daily calls from the mortgage company which we do not answer. As far as we know, the sheriff sale still has not occurred. We have been out of our home in DE since December 2009 and have not paid the mortgage since July 2010 and this has been a terrible thing to encounter. But as said before, the mortgage company can do what they want because with what all we have been through in 2010 with my husband’s surgeries, cancer, paralysis, another move, him not working, etc – that is the least of our worries and they can do what they want with us. We have gotten legal papers in the mail several times but having You Walk Away there to review them and advise / explain has been a relief also. We don’t know when this will all end but I am thinking that renting for the rest of our lives looks like the way to go, because we have made consistent, regular house payments for over 30 years and when a crisis occurs, the mortgage companies are not going to help us. My priorities are definitely different than they were when we left our home in Dec 2009 in DE. We would have never thought of missing a mortgage payment (or any other payment) at that time and now it is insignificant.” -Holly Rolt