Foreclosure Pain In Personal Stories

Posted in Foreclosure, October 7th, 2008 |

Numbers are cold and impersonal and cannot give in depth the true agony of the raging foreclosure crisis. The foreclosure pain can be gauged only in personal stories and happenings.

Sometimes Kruk cannot believe it is happening to her. She has been hearing about foreclosures but hearing and experiencing it is quite something else. She is single and spent good many years looking after the vegetable patch in her family house. She rented out a part of the house and was quite content with her life. Her uncle who lived down the road was a politician and the street was named after him. For 17 years Kruk had been employed in a casino.

Foreclosure clouds began to gather when she lost her job and her unemployment cheque was not enough to handle the mortgage. Her mortgage, like that of many others, belonged to the sub-prime category with a tag of floating interest. Initially for the first two years it was fixed but then it began to swing upwards. She could hear foreclosure knocking as every three months it began to go up and up. She began to stumble and be late. This led to late fees. The net result was that the foreclosure warning knock began to get louder and louder as monthly payments began to rise and rise.

Why did Kruk opt for such a mortgage? For those in her station of life and income prime mortgages were not available. So at that time the sub-prime seemed to be a godsend and an answer to the American dream of owning a house. In Cape May County foreclosures have been hiking since 2004. It jumped to 615 in 2007 from 275 in 2004. In the first quarter of 2008 there were 247 foreclosure filings. If the trend continues then before the year draws to a close it is apprehended there will be 988 foreclosures.

When Kruk lost her job the bank warned it would foreclose on her. It did so in September 2007 with the bank demanding $118,000. The bank agreed to a short sale by which the lender was willing to accept less than the loan amount. But no buyer could be found. At the last minute there was some hitch or the other. Finally she had to surrender her house to a foreclosure auction. As she prepares to move out, among the mementos littered on the floor is a frayed rug that belonged to her grandmother.