Foreclosure Nation: What It’s Like to Lose Your House

While everyone was celebrating the New Year, I was thinking, “My foreclosure is happening soon. This year my children and I will be evicted from our home.”

My situation is due to an ex-husband who didn’t keep up his end of the Divorce Agreement – something that has happened to a lot of people I’m sure. He actually stopped paying my mortgage in January of 2007 – months before the financial crisis hit everyone else. I had an early financial crisis.

In fact, the nationwide crisis actually helped me – it overshadowed my personal crisis and my mortgage was lost for a while in the onslaught.

A lawyer friend also helped me forestall the crisis for a while. So I’ve been living for three years now knowing that my two children and I could be evicted any time.

I now have a firm date: May of 2010. Despite all the extra time, during which I finished graduate school and looked for a job, my financial situation hasn’t much improved. My ex-husband, prince that he is, is in prison now for embezzlement and fraud so there’s no help coming from there. People don’t seem to be lining up to hire  a47-year-old women, astonishingly enough. Despite my super amazing credentials.

I made the difficult decision to send my nine-year-old son away to a choir boarding school – through a serendipitous series of events, his talent was discovered and he auditioned and was accepted. I would never have sent him if we had been secure financially. Interestingly, he loves his choir boarding school (in Manhattan) and it has enriched all of our lives – we live in a wealth of music and wonderful people at the St. Thomas Church in New York.

There are exceptional details in everyone’s situation. Our relationship to the choir school is pretty unique, and it has also created restrictions – we cannot move too far from Manhattan,because we want to be near my son –and yet living near Manhattan is expensive.

But many can’t imagine what foreclosure is really like. Four years ago I never would have dreamed that I’d be in this situation. Here’s what I can tell you about it:

Enduring an impending foreclosure, combined with not knowing where you’ll go and how you’ll get there and how you will care for your kids, is excruciating.

People/churches will bring you cooked meal or offer help if you are bereaved, but they dismiss financial difficulties. They don’t want to know and they can’t help. It’s embarrassing for them. (I was so tempted to stand up in church one Sunday during “Joys and Concerns” and say, “I am concerned. My ex-husband won’t be paying any child support because he’s in prison for twenty months. And my kids and I will be evicted from our home in May,” but I didn’t have the nerve and I don’t think it would have gotten a good reaction.) I’ve even had a psychologist deny that my problems are real: “Oh, that won’t really happen,” one of them said when I told her about my foreclosure.  Say what?

If you had had your house stolen or all your money taken by someone like a robber or, say, a Bernie Madoff, people would sympathize. But if you are in your bad situation because of an abusive spouse, as I am (my ex-husband stole my money and left me bankrupt too — it’s legal to steal from your spouse), then people don’t conceive of you as a victim but, rather, as a fool who deserves her comeuppance.

Likewise, if you are having difficulties, whether it is your fault or not, people feel free to criticize you, especially if they have done something to help. There’s something about being down and out that inspires others to censure. I have had this experience confirmed by friends who’ve suffered their own difficulties — they tell me that they also dealt with additional gratuitous criticisms from people (change your hair; your car is not appropriate; you should not be going to grad school; you should get a job as a secretary) and that the criticisms ended when their situations improved.

Living with an impending foreclosure is like having PTSD – with nightmares and the rest.

It’s socially isolating. People don’t really want to hang out with someone who’s losing her home – what can you do about it? Say, gee, sorry, and I am having a really hard time deciding where to vacation this year? Feel obligated to help somehow – yet how? It’s too immense.

And yet there are the people who pitch in and help in surprising ways. Some anonymously. Someone was sending me $50 bills for a while — I never learned who it was. I applied for a grant and was awarded $2,500. Sometimes people help by doing work, like my lawyer friend Ellery Plotkin of Stamford, who won me a couple of extra years, and Herb Kolodney, of Computerdocs.biz, who has helped me with computer problems gratis. And it’s little things, like people taking you out to dinner . . . it’s surprising how rarely I go out to dinner.

As the New Year rings in, I have no idea where or how I’m going to move my family. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for it. I’ll keep you posted.

Photo by Nick Bastian Tempe, AZ