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Mind you, my question is not about someone paying our mortgage every month or even adjusting our loan BE-100Wdocuments to reflect the actual value of my house. Nope. All my husband (which I will be referring to as "Nick" from now on) and I were asking for was a small reduction to make our payments fairer and help us out every month. Whether it be by means of stretching out the duration of our loan or by giving us a short forbearance period. Before we default. Before we are forced to leave our home.
Let me outline our situation: when we got our loan in November of 2003, we had already been living at my father-in-law's home for over 18 months. It was time to get our own home. At the time I had an eBay store that was yielding me about $1,800.00 a month by selling articles I imported directly. My husband had a steady job and we found a "nice" broker who was eager to find us a loan. The fact that we lived in Sacramento at the time did not help. The greater Sacramento was a notoriously inflated market, which forced us to look for houses more than 40 miles away from Nick's job, which was bad enough but my husband was willing to sacrifice and face the tough commute in exchange for a lower house price. When the going got tougher (i.e.: soaring gas prices, higher grocery expenses, eBay lost its advantages, the dollar tumbled, etc.) we did all we could. Nick started working 50 hours a week, we dropped our landline and premium channels, cut our eating out trips from once a month to never, forgot about the existence of movie theaters and movie rentals and basically learned to live even more frugally than before. Still, we were relying on credit cards in order to help us pay for groceries. That is basically our story, which I am aware is not unique. Eighteen months HA-022Xafter Nick started working 50 hours a week, his employer cut his overtime. After a long struggle of robbing Peter to pay Paul we had no choice but to file bankruptcy. It was an emotional and very hard decision to make. We acted in good faith all along the way and the struggle was basically for nothing. Last month we contacted Countrywide. The company had received a substantial part of the bailout and Nick and I thought we would finally get a break. We gave them details of our financial situation - which had not improved greatly even after the bankruptcy, given that our mortgage payment eats up a whopping 63% of our monthly earnings. They finally contacted us last week - over a month later - and denied us any assistance whatsoever. For the first time in 5 years, we were late in our payment one
In the meantime, the CEO of Countrywide, Angelo Mozilo, justifies his multi-year, multi-million dollar bonuses and perks because he "started the company from the ground up", conveniently forgetting that had it not been for people like me and Nick, his company would not be so "prosperous". Unlike us, Countrywide got a huge chunk of the bailout cash when it needed it. All we asked for was a break that we have been told not to count on. Our home is now worth less than half of what we bought it for. Instead of helping us out now, apparently Countrywide prefers to wait until Nick and I finally give up. This time, contrary to the bankruptcy process which brought about a lot of tears to my eyes, we decided it is just not worth it. We SF-040Xnow have been planning or future with cold and calculated resolve. When the time comes, we will default on our loan (or, as I put it, we will grant ourselves the forbearance we desperately need) and when foreclosure inevitably catches up with us, we will leave our home and never look back. And chalk it up as a painful lesson learned.