Thursday, March 31, 2011

Wednesday 3/30/2011


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Wednesday

Where does it end? I read and read and read all kinds of "expert" opinion on whether to keep a home, send in the keys, let them foreclose, short sale and now a "deed in lieu of foreclosure" action. The latest one I read was speaking about the last one, but then proclaimed going bankrupt may be a better option.

?!!!

It's all utter insanity. It doesn't matter which one of those you take, you are screwed, in terms of your credit rating and it's going to stay that way a long, long time.

I have struggled with this entire situation for some time now. What to do. At one point, I was settled to stay in the house and live with the loss of being underwater.

Yesterday, looking at the FMV published on the county's site, and seeing the house is now valued, by them anyway, at nearly HALF of what I actually owe on it? I'm pulling my hair out on this situation. I have no clear cut path to take here. It isn't a Y in the road, it's more like standing in the middle of an intersection with 8 roads leading out of it, none of the roads leading anywhere good.

In a case like this, when I don't know what to do - or more like can't decide what to do - I will do nothing. Stay in the house, eat the loss for now and see what comes down the road.

I just made the third payment of the 3-month trial in the HAMP modification. I don't know....what to do at this point.

I know what a lot of people are doing: stop making the payments and save the money. Stay in the house as long as possible until they come to boot you out. Minimum 6 months before that happens, a lot longer in many cases. In fact, I know a family that has not made a payment in over a year's time. Still in the house, but, they have been notified they have to be out by the end of next month.

That doesn't really answer the question, though, and I wonder about the ethics of staying in a house that you aren't paying for but enjoying the benefits of a free roof over your head, while you take that money and stuff it into savings. Perhaps that is a small piece of the puzzle as to why the economy is where it's at right now.

Of course, if you lose your job and you CAN'T make the payments, that might paint a different picture. What are you going to do, move out onto the streets? Desperation forces people to do things they normally would not.

I'm really quite clueless here as to what to do, going around in a large circle and coming back to the same point and question.

With that floating around in my head, I am still battling this tax situation. I am going to have to make a trip to downtown Phoenix to get a hard copy of the FMV for my old house before it burned down for tax purposes. The proof that the house burned down will take up to 45 DAYS to receive, but I can file the return without it, I may have to show that proof later on, but getting the return filed before the 15th is the goal. I may go to that department as well and see if I can get that expedited.

As for the contents of the house, I am supposed to put that as a separate loss, at least from what I am gathering. I don't know, but when I send in the tax return, I already have an itemized listing of the things I lost in that fire and how much I think it was worth at the time. I did that a long time ago and saved it in an email - which I am glad I did because the old computer has crashed several times since then and that information would have been lost. I would be racking my brains attempting to remember everything that was in that house at the time.

Now, proving that I had that stuff? Not possible. Maybe - now that I think about it - I might have pics on my Photobucket account - I think I took pics of everything and uploaded them. I'll have to go through the 1,000 photos I have on there and see. It would at least help. I do have pics on my Zillow account - just a few - that show the damage to the house from the outside, pretty bad stuff indeed.

Umm, work day is here and I am lost in a conundrum of thought concerning all of this.

ben

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