Financials

Okay, here's the deal.

My family and I have been pushed to the pointy end of fiscal disaster.  During the Dot.Com bust, we lost all our savings and racked up a pile of unsecured debt.  We managed to keep the house, though.  After that, we spent several years paying off the debt.  In the spring of 2009, we were down to only a couple of thousand dollars of debt.  Then, more shit happened, which resulted in us moving from Oregon to California to find work.  We sold the house in Oregon, bought a house in California and kept slugging on.  That was the major mistake, I think.  The cost of living in California is remarkably *more* than it was in Oregon.

However.  Here we are.  In all the various job issues over the last 2 years, we have had to slowly whittle away at what little savings we had.  Medical insurance went away, and we've had to buy privately, at the cost of over $2K a month.

We've spent the last year, every time something goes wrong, trimming expenses and recalculating that we should be okay, "if nothing else goes wrong".  Well, things keep going wrong and I don't imagine that process is going to change much.

Today, we are unemployed, with less than one months expenses in financial cushion.  If a job doesn't come, and right soon, we're facing foreclosure, probably some time in the spring.  We can't sell the house, because we have no where to go, we don't have enough money to put down first/last/deposit on a rental somewhere.  We might be underwater anyway.  Oh, yeah, and it needs a new roof, to the tune of maybe $18K.  Gah.

Yesterday, I called the mortgage company (BofA) to discuss this mess.  They will have a "modification" team contact me soon.  We have spoken to some programs that should offer help; Green Path Debt Solutions and KeepYourHomeCalifornia.Org are the two biggies, among others.  The first one advised my husband to look for a job.  Du-oh.  The second one can't help us until *after* the unemployment checks start arriving.  We won't qualify until we have *more* income than we do today.  Eh?  So those things are out there.  We're doing all the right and responsible things.

So, the focus of this blog is changing.  I intend to publicly record the process of foreclosure, if and when it comes down to that.  People don't talk about these things.  I am inspired in this by my friend, Jay Lake, who blogs very thoroughly about his experience with cancer and chemo.