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My wife and I are in a pretty dire financial situation. Due to severe depression and anxiety, I've been in and out of crap jobs since 2008 and in various states of unemployment and underemployment. I pretty much don't have a career at this point, and on top of that we live in Alabama, where we constantly trade 1st and 2nd place with Mississippi for things like unemployment, poor education, infant mortality, death by misadventure, morbid obesity and such. I'm currently working at home as a transcriptionist, which goons in this forum have been known to make decent money off of, but I just can't make it work for me. My wife and I bought our house at the height of the bubble when I was much worse off with my mental state and generally confused with where my life would be taking me. It was a dumb thing to do when you're unsure of the future. So of course we've been underwater for years now and things don't seem to be getting any better. Currently I have about $85k on the mortgage, and the highest estimate I can get for selling is $45k. We've been living paycheck to paycheck so far in 2014 when I got fired by my latest job and started the transcription thing. Money's tight, but we do not have frivolous spending or debt, besides student loans. We have no savings anymore. Making it worse, I'm trying to pay for much needed therapy and medication. We barely make the mortgage payments, but we're a car accident or medical bill away from things going bad. I want to leave town and go to a city with better opportunities for us, but there's the house. My plan is not to move somewhere and hope for the best, but to find a job first and decide if we can stand living wherever it is, and also have reasonable prospects for my wife's field of work. I'm thinking of starting the short sale process, but I'm unsure if it's a good idea. On one hand, we'll be starting from scratch and living with damaged credit for a while. On the other, I'm just waiting for things to get better here without being able to do anything about it. Is this a good idea? Or at least a not horrible idea?
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# ¿ Aug 28, 2014 22:02 |
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# ¿ May 22, 2024 06:39 |
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adorai posted:If you are going to move, can you find a tenant? Being a landlord sucks, but it's better than the alternative. Speaking of alternatives, if it were me, I would rather default on the student loans than short sell the house. Any rent income wouldn't nearly cover my mortgage payment. PromethiumX posted:Have you tried modifying your mortgage under HARP? Yeah, I don't qualify for HARP. Wouldn't foreclosing be worse than a short sale? I was under the impression that a short sale was less bad.
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# ¿ Aug 29, 2014 05:07 |
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spwrozek posted:Why would the bank agree to the short sale and taking the hit? I don't know. I plan on sending in the paperwork and financial information soon and seeing what they say. I'm also not sure what the difference will be given that the bank is the Alabama Housing Finance Authority and not a private entity. They gave that young stupid me a no down payment mortgage under a program that involved some sort of Hurricane Katrina relief. Bloody Queef posted:Is this because you're not current on your mortgage? I am current on my mortgage, but that's not likely to stay that way for very long. I've whittled my savings down to $500 because of an essential car repair, plus I was sick for a week last month and couldn't work, both putting strain on a fragile situation. Another month like that and I'll start missing payments for sure. I'm not entirely sure a new city will change everything, but it could get me a livable wage at least, and a chance to try to get a career started. I figured expanding the job search outside of this small city would improve my chances of not failing. I suppose that's a whole other issue, though, the depression, joblessness, unemployability, and all that. I'm trying to possibly relieve some of the pressure about the house so I can more easily deal with the other things. Edit: I should clarify that I don't qualify for harp because it's neither a Fannie nor a Freddie loan. Zapf Dingbat fucked around with this message at 14:48 on Aug 29, 2014 |
# ¿ Aug 29, 2014 14:44 |
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mastershakeman posted:You may qualify for HAMP or even your lender's specific in house programs. It's likely that there's a local housing counseling agency you could make an appointment with and visit that would be able to help you out. Depending on your specific situation, there's a lot of options, you just need someone to go over what's available and what your state's foreclosure proceedings could be like if things went that far. Hmm, I didn't know about HAMP. I'll look into that. You're right, I'll go talk to one of these HUD people to see what they say about the situation. TouchyMcFeely posted:The ideal situation would be to avoid short selling your house if at all possible. Well, here we are then: Bills: Rent/Mortgage $797.87 Phone $113.70 Internet $29.99 Electricity $124.97 (year-long average) Water $42.00 Natural Gas/Propane/Oil $60.68 (year-long average) Netflix $7.99 Groceries $450.00 Gasoline $110.00 Medical $75.00 Car Insurance $156.20 Health Insurance $180.96 Student Loan Payment $223.72 Therapist $180.00 Total: $2553.08 Income: Me: Anywhere from $1,200 to $1,500 (pre-taxes) Wife: $1,843.24 (post taxes) My wife works in the printing industry as a pre-press artist, which means she's not on the creative side of things but on the technical, let's-make-sure-this-prints-out-correctly side. She doesn't want to be a purely creative graphic designer, which limits our options I guess, but there are a lot of printing companies out there. As for my qualifications and experience, that's a can of worms. I can't settle on anything, and my resume shows that. My first real mistake was thinking I wanted to be in TV, going to school for it, and then realizing that the unstable people that work in TV plus the high amounts of stress involved don't sit well with mental illness. This was before meds and therapy. Have at it.
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# ¿ Aug 29, 2014 21:17 |
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I walk away from the thread and look at it. Okay, I'll try to catch up.buzzsaw.gif posted:Hello, I will weigh in on this to maybe prevent a decision that has consequences you don't know about. Don't worry, I'm not taking the advice of SA as my sole source of information. People on BFC seem on the level and give practical advice, and can be pretty impartial. That's not something I'm getting from friends and family. I'm not dead set on anything yet, and I plan on seeking actual professional advice. CuddleChunks posted:Good lord how many cars do you have and do you have a clean driving record? Why are you paying $1874.40 a year in car insurance? Finding a way lower that would certainly help free up money for other things. Velochis posted:Try posting your resume in the megathread for help. As it stands it is nowhere near ready for real career type applications. (3 pages long with 10+ bullets about you taking senior pictures? Come on man! ) That resume was a product of Resume to Interviews. It wasn't originally so long. I'll have to think a lot about the resume, though. It'll take some creativity to fix it. moana posted:Are you both looking for jobs outside of your state? It sounded kind of like you were the only one looking for work right now, is that the case or did I just misread you? Do you have any skills outside of your resume? Does your wife? We're both looking for jobs. The resume has pretty much all my concrete skills, besides homebrewing. I wouldn't be opposed to an entry level job at a craft brewery. But that's a little silly. Bloody Queef posted:I'm not one to advocate a rice and beans diet, and forgive me if I missed mouths other than you and your wife, but holy poo poo this is high. You live in a rural area so supermarkets are a thing, you're not existing on food from corner stores. My wife and I eat a lot of local grass fed beef, eggs from a local farm, and that hippy and/or expensive poo poo and we're at $400 even including tp and that stuff. I don't know what to tell you. We buy whole chickens at $1.00/pound or lower, cut them up, freeze them, and use the inedible parts for stock. We buy from cheaper grocery stores and buy according to sales. We do get fruits and vegetables from these stores. We try to eat pretty healthy, and none of our groceries are organic. We hardly eat out anymore... once every two or three weeks if that. I lump my toiletries under groceries, plus any cleaning products like Lysol or something. swenblack posted:This isn't particularly useful. $450/month is $7.50/person/day. That's really not that high. It's a step above rice and beans, but not by all that much, particularly if it includes toiletries. I could be the ultimate coupon mom but it still wouldn't fix the fact I'm going nowhere.
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# ¿ Aug 30, 2014 03:42 |
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Looks like I missed one.TouchyMcFeely posted:With you doing transcription work at home you're pretty mobile but what about your wife? Would she have better opportunities with what she's doing in another location? Yes, my wife would definitely have better opportunities elsewhere. There are about 3 companies in her field in this area, and she's got the highest paying one. There's a ton of printing in Atlanta, for instance. Was there HR in my resume? I've never been in that position except for a short stint at the census in 2010, and that was firing people. I live in the suburbs of Mobile, a small city on the gulf coast. We do grow herbs in our garden, but any more substantial veggies are snuffed out by the virtual canopy rain forest that is our back yard. Oak trees in neighbors' yards, hedges... No sunlight for veggies. We've tried for years. I'll shop around for the phones. I'm not sure what my options are, but I'll find something.
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# ¿ Aug 30, 2014 03:52 |
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# ¿ May 22, 2024 06:39 |
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TouchyMcFeely posted:Do your student loans qualify for Income Based Repayment or do you have any deferrals available? I totally forgot about this. I had done it in years past, but had to get off it when I had found a proper job. Thanks for reminding me. TouchyMcFeely posted:Do you have an idea of how much of a boost your wife's income would get by moving to Atlanta and have you looked at other cities like Montgomery, Tallahassee or New Orleans? We think it would be a noticeable boost even considering the higher cost of living. I'm job hunting nationwide, really, but focusing on the southeast and/or places where we have friends or family. New Orleans I wouldn't mind one bit, but there don't seem to be any opportunities for my wife there. Sucks because she has family there. To tell you the truth, though, we're also looking to move out of podunk places like Alabama and north Florida because we have the added burden of being an interracial couple in the deep south (black/white). TouchyMcFeely posted:That really sucks about your back yard not getting any sun. Any chance there is a community garden in town that trades shares for labor? That's funny. TouchyMcFeely posted:On the income side, what are the chance you could pickup some extra work? Whether it's doing additional transcribing or maybe some odd jobs during the day? Yeah, I'll have some better weeks than what I laid out above, but never below the example I gave. It also depends a lot on my mental state, whether I can handle the work. Aside from grocery chat, I looked into the car insurance. I feel like an idiot for overlooking that. I'm changing to another company next week.
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# ¿ Aug 30, 2014 17:09 |