So there we were! Our own little home. Cozy, but doable. At the time we were searching for a place to buy (in September of 2005), there were some signs that the housing market was slowing down a little but we said, "Pshaw! It's not a bubble!" Famous last words, right?
The value of our condo has fallen 42%. 42%!!!! Yes, when we got our assessment this year, it was valued at $157,600. Yowzers. This wasn't a surprise this year, of course; we saw that our value was falling all along, as follows:
2006: $268K
2007: $220K
2008: $209K (this was wishful thinking on the part of our county, but whatev)
Basically, we're stuck here. It will take many, many years for the value of this place to even get close to what we owe on the mortgage. As in, my youngest, who's currently four, would probably be in high school. Completely unacceptable. We can't rent the place (due to terms in our mortgage) and even if we could, we'd take a huge loss every month.
We put the place on the market in hopes that we could complete a short sale. All that resulted in was many months of me cleaning like a madwoman but no offers. We didn’t really think it would work, but we wanted to give it a shot. And, of course, we had talked to our lender many times before this, but they basically told us they couldn’t modify our loan because of the way it was securitized. This was our only shot.
The only choice left? Walk away.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment