I know I haven’t been writing here much.  Haven’t had much going on that I wanted to write about.  The one big thing on our minds around here is something I’m not very proud of, but thought I’d throw it out here and see if the half dozen of you who still come around might find it interesting.

My family is going through what millions of families have been going through over the past year or so.  We’re looking at losing our house.  Now we didn’t buy a house that we couldn’t afford, and we didn’t get a mortgage that exploded one day.  Life happened and the economy happened.  I lost my job and didn’t find a new one for a month and a half, then my wife lost her job and didn’t find a new one for a month and a half, and we had utilities to pay and food to buy and we fell behind in our mortgage.  Our lender is NOT willing to work with us to bring down the payments or to put what’s missing on the end of the loan.  They want a payment and a half until we’re caught up.  And the way the cost of living went up and didn’t really come back down, we can no longer really afford the mortgage payment much less a payment and a half.  We’re the other ones.  The ones you really don’t hear about much.  We didn’t do anything wrong, we bought the place in good faith.  We never thought we’d be trying to choose between paying the mortgage and paying for food.  What really kills me is that if we get rid of cable, cell phones and internet, we’d still be short.  I’ve never been in that position before.  We’ve tightened our belts before, but even if we do now, it doesn’t matter.  What really kills me is that we’re making more now than we were when we bought the place.  Kinda makes me crazy.

The only thing that MIGHT save us is if there’s anything in the President’s Magical Bailout for us.  Our problem?  We don’t want YOU paying for OUR mortgage.  We’re seriously against that, and besides, from everything I’ve read, we’re not really the folks the President is trying to save.  Our lender didn’t screw us over, they didn’t see the economy tanking either.  Otherwise, they wouldn’t have lent us the money in the first place.

So we’re looking and believe we found a nice little rental house.  I’ve been trying to contact our lender all week but all I get is voicemail.  Apparently, we’re not the only ones wanting to talk to them.

We’re going to lose our house and I’d like to feel worse about it but after all the figuring we’ve done I just can’t.  We simply can’t afford this place.  God help us if the hot water heater or the a/c or the furnace died.  There’s no way to replace them.  God help us if we had anything happen to either of the cars, which we NEED to work.

We can’t keep going like this and that means letting them foreclose.  That hurts.  I tend to be on the proud side in case you’ve missed that part of my character over the years and we’re going through all five stages of mourning.  I’m going to really miss the backyard, but I’m thinking we can get to the foothills easier once we can buy a tank of gas without worrying about we have enough money for food.