We have been in our house for 2 ½ years well it has been in foreclosure. I figured I might as well share a little on how we have helped slow it down to take so long.
We were consistently 60 days behind our house payment for about 6-9 months. We were considering in January 2008 filing for bankruptcy and we were currently two months behind in our house payment. We had some awful things happen between January and March 2008 and we decided by April 1st that we were ready to declare bankruptcy and use the house in the bankruptcy as well. We then missed our April payment to make up a full 90 days behind and within a week we got foreclosure papers from the bank.
In May 2008 we filed bankruptcy and it took until July for us to get accepted into the bankruptcy court. Even though the house was already in foreclosure, filing bankruptcy brought that process to a screaming hault and the bank was forced to close the foreclosure until the bankruptcy was discharge. Discharging takes longer and even though we had court in July we were not discharged until October 2008. It took the bank until the end of November 2008 to send us paperwork again to start the foreclosure.
Well I can’t say that it is in any way “good” timing but for us it seemed to be good timing. Since the economy crash came on full force around the fall 2008 it took clear until July 2009 to get our first Sheriff Sale notice. So far we had been in our house now for a year and a half.
Obama passed a bunch of new housing laws and literally the day of the Sheriff sale the bank was forced to cancel it and send us an affidative to fill out and see if they could work out a deal with us to keep the house. Well it is now 9 months later and we got a second Sheriff’s sale notice in the mail and only because the bank lost our paper work we faxed to them 9 months ago. We sent in new paperwork almost 2 weeks ago and as we talked to the bank today they said that after they put in the information into their system they will then flag our account asking to have the Sheriff’s sale cancelled well they log in all our info. If it is accepted to stop the sale then it will take 12-14 weeks for them to review our paperwork and either work out something with us or put the house back up for Sheriff’s sale.
I am posting this because I am finding a lot of people in my life are going through or thinking about doing foreclosure and bankruptcy. If you want to milk it as long as you can file for bankruptcy as soon as you hit that 90 days or shortly after and let it takes its course as everything is really delayed right now and you could be in your house longer then we have been.
It is not that I want to live like this forever but since the bankruptcy we have $10,000 in medical bills hanging over our heads and I have been able to pay down half of it in just about a year and I could not have done that if we were making a mortgage payment.
I can’t wait to be back into a home that we own again someday and have our finances back to normal but for now this is how we have had to do it.
