First of all, what a beauty. Reminds me of that I need a Miami too
But secondly, are you still in this situation? OMG that is terrible. Or where you talking in past tense?
I lost my job two months ago. I have worked for a bank the last 10 years as a system developer. My wife and I bought a new house this year and had a baby. Man, what a terrible time this was. But luckily I found a new job and can start in january 2010.
That's great, Marcel, that you got a new job! Congrats! Well, we don't know if we'll really lose it--we are just taking steps to prepare for the worst as best we can. We are "upside down" in it (we now owe more than it is actually worth) and our loan becomes adjustable in September 2010. That means that the refinancing of the loan that we planned to do when we bought the house won't be possible. If interest rates go up too high we'll be tight making the payments, but we can make them. Our house isn't worth much--we bought the cheapest thing we could find that didn't need major work--so we can stand a lot of variation in interest rates, actually, but if we can't get our loan renegotiated, we
may be in trouble--it depends on circumstances.
If my wife finishes her PhD by the fall or soon after and is able to transition right into a job, we will be ok. If she finishes her PhD by then or soon after and isn't able to find anything (which could just as easily happen as not in this market), we won't. At that point, her school loans will kick in and that plus no job plus a higher mortgage payment, well, we won't be able to do it. Plus, I'm looking at finishing my PhD in the next year, too, and who knows if I'll find a job, either, and my school loans will come due, too, so it's two of us in that boat. Anything could happen, and a lot of the possible outcomes result in us not being able to make ends meet.
I've basically been assuming for the past year that we'll lose the house and that we've just been paying rent to a bank instead of to a landlord. If we do, it's no big deal. We'll get on our feet once we get jobs and we won't be homeless in the interim (my wife's family lives here and we could stay with them if we needed to). It would totally screw my wife's credit if we were foreclosed on, but there are other things banks are doing these days to allow people to get out of their houses without foreclosure--we're looking into that. And I'm not on the loans, and one advantage to not being allowed to be legally married is that if we default on the mortgage, it can't touch my credit, so once we DO get jobs, if we find a place we want to settle down, I could still potentially buy a house.
We just need to get jobs. That's the main thing. Even in the worst case scenario, though,
we'll be fine. It's just a house. And the snakes are just snakes, and money's just money.
It makes it easier not to have to worry about feeding and housing a human child!!!
