Posted January 21, 2010 by

These Boots Are Made For Walking

It seems there's a new trend in home ownership; walking away from it.  I can speak from personal experience when I say that sometimes it's easier to walk away even when you think you have done everything "right" in terms of securing the appropriate financing and making a 20% down payment.  The unforeseen for us was buying at a time when money was easy to come by, and new construction was abundant in a city that had endless opportunity for growth. The old adage that "everything that goes up must come down" is fitting when used to describe the housing market my husband and I became proud homeowners turned defaulters in.

Moving to Phoenix and building our dream home during the peak of the housing market was our first mistake, but at a time when developers were utilizing a lottery system to select potential buyers, it seemed like the thing to do.  My husband was working for one of these such home builders and had the inside scoop on where the development was taking place, and the long term projections for growth, so you could say we drank the Kool-aid and jumped in with both feet and all of our savings.  Fast forward 2 years and the times had changed drastically, rumors of banks going under, construction coming to a halt and people losing their jobs.  Of course this was just the beginning of the housing market crash and we found ourselves in the same sticky situation as millions of people, we owned a house that was no longer worth what we owed.  Concurrently, my husband has left his job and was looking for the next opportunity which we ultimately decided would require a move so we put our house on the market to test how bad things really were...and it sat...and sat...and sat.  Eleven months passed before we finally rented our dream to a tenant we would later discover was in an even worse situation, and would eventually quit paying us rent.  To make a long story short, we were one of the lucky ones who were able to make a deal with the bank which would allow us to Short Sale our property.  But the bank was not always cooperative, we had to default on our loan before they would even speak to us.

I saw the following article in the New York Times and thought it would be worth sharing my story as well as the authors view.  Like I said before, sometimes you have to just walk away, but take the lesson with you.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10FOB-wwln-t.html

• Categories:
• Default,
• Development,
• Loan Modification,
• New Construction,
• Short Sale