Upcoming Foreclosures

For those of you going into foreclosure, what did you in?

I am just wondering and I don't quite understand why everyone seems to be going in foreclosure at the same time. Did you lose a job? Have a super high house payment? What was it?

Public Comments

1. One of the main reasons for so many people to be going into foreclosure all at once is that the Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) that people qualified for and procured to purchase homes, are coming due and adjusting higher right now. Sometimes for hundreds of dollars a month higher than what they're currently paying. Also, since home values have stagnated or gone down in many parts of the country, these same people cannot sell or refinance their homes. These two, put together, makes it near impossible for some people to continue paying for their homes, and thus, foreclosure..
2. For the most part it was those three little letters Adjustable Rate Mortgage Rates were fixed for a little while, but then adjust to a different (and usually higher) rate. Once the rate adjusts, people can't handle the higher rate, and default on the mortgage. Another reason is that people who shouldn't have houses due to low credit scores were getting approved for mortgages they had either no means or no intention of paying back.
3. I agree with trblmkr3... In addition,some buyers also "wrote a check that their butts couldn't cash"...in other words,they got greedy, bought properties that they knew they couldn't afford, counting on being able to semi - effortlessly flip them, making tons of money...that was in that fantasyland that the real-estate community was living in for several years. The lenders are partly to blame,,, convincing buyers that all they really had to worry about was the monthly house payment, with little attention to the detail that the payment would go up someday due to the rate increase. Some buyers honestly thought they would make more money by the time the rates readjusted. Some buyers didn't read the contracts (no excuse there, just reality.) Some buyers AND sellers (and agents, and brokers) just plain got greedy, getting caught up in the artificial wave of buying, profitting, and selling. The blame can go around and around...but the bottom line is that it's our economy that is,in part, having to pay the price. It really is true what they say about Karma. :0 Hope that helps answer your question.
4. we are not in foreclosure but do have a hard time paying our mortgage. I will be honest, we were not ready to buy a house. We weren't thinking of buying and didn't even have any money saved to buy one. We needed a larger apartment but the rents ( at the time) were in the area of 13-1800 a month and it made no sense to us to pay that when we could own a house for that. So that is what we did on a whim one day, we saw a house we liked, called up a mortgage company, some how got approved with our God awful credit and 30 days later, we were home owners. It was just so simple! Reality set in that owning a home was not merely just paying the mortgage, there is also the taxes, water bill, other utilities and insurance to deal with. Add all that in with other normal bills and it can easily become too much for people. We were stupid. We should have waited and now are having a tough time of it, but not foreclosure tough....yet. We are looking into our options right now. I will not blame it on anyone else, not the bank or RE agents or house seller, it is all us and many other people felt like they should own a home and it was easy for them to, but not so easy to maintain it as they thought.
5. I'm not foreclosing my home, but I understand why many are and will be soon. I have an adjustable rate mortgage which has already reset this month which adds an extra 800 to my current mortgage payment of 2400. that doesn't include hoa dues of 249/month and so on so forth. the rate will adjust again in 6 months making it an extra 1000 on top of my 2400! ridiculous? yes. for my iddy biddy 2 bed/2 bath condo. in san jose,ca yes. I can't refinance the house because it would cost about 80,000 up front. since the value of my home had dropped drastically from the time I purchased it in 2005, Its hard to refi and selling the house for such a low price bites too. A short sale won't work either because I can't qualify. Fortunately I can afford the new house payment but I hate that its so high. For that much, I can have a nice single family home. I was even thinking about foreclosing this house myself because I'm so stuck with it.
6. To get a clue about why so many are facing foreclosure all at once, just drive around to the closest shopping center in your neighborhood. Look at all the stupid, pointless, expensive garbage that people keep buying, because they can just whip out a credit card and don't ever think about actually paying for things. When interest rates were lowered close to 0%, banks started giving out mortgages like they were credit cards. Homeowners started buying houses and refinancing their homes as if they were ATMs. Banks would approve a family for a maximum loan amount, and appraisers would give the house a value of that amount, in order to increase fees and commissions for the mortgage broker and real estate agent. Homeowners, in order to get as much money as possible, just lied on their loan applications, overstating their income by 50% or more. Banks, eager to hand out money, approved the loans no questions asked. It didn't take too long for the first homeowners who could never afford their homes to begin with to find out that they couldn't afford their homes. But several foreclosures in an area will start to drag down prices. And homeowners who financed 110% of the purchase price couldn't sell quickly if they ran into a job loss or medical problem. Property values declined, making it even more difficult for homeowners to sell to avoid foreclosure. And more foreclosures couldn't be avoided, pushing property values down even further. So you had a bunch of big banks handing out money and homeowners lying to receive money. That imbalance paved the way for the housing market to enter a depression at the first sign of defaults and property value declines. Hope that answers your question. ForeclosureFish