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Hopefully this post will be irrelevant to the vast majority of my readers but for those of you that are contemplating losing your house in this hard mortgage time, a little encouragement won’t hurt.

You see, I HAVE Been There Too.

Back in the last economic recession/slowdown/readjustment during 1993, the wife and I had just purchased our own home. It was more than the realtor recommended for our debt/income levels, but we could make the payments (barely) and thought that it was better to get more house now, rather than ‘trading up’ later. So I went ahead and bought the house.

I say I because I made the #1 financial mistake you can make in a marriage, not getting your spouse’s support on financial decisions. Yes, I still hear about it to this day, 14 years later. I was a gung-ho pro-homeownership, I’ve-lived-in-rentals-my-whole-life-and-hated-it buyer. I convinced my wife finally to sign the paperwork, even though she had some VERY fearful feelings about the whole thing.

We had the VA providing a zero down mortgage, and our closing costs were about $1000, which was a HUGE amount for us. We put part of the down, on some of our credit cards. (Sob!)

We bought the house in a small college town near the Air Force base where my wife worked. This place was SO small that when the students came back to school, the town’s population literally DOUBLED in size.

We were doing ok for the time, I had just left the army a year or so before and was working on my degree, while working part-time, and the wife had her Air Force position to support us as well.

Then Things Started Going Down Hill

In 1993, the Air Force had a huge Reduction In Forces (RIF) enforced on them by congress, so they were letting go people left and right. My wife was one of the ones singled out for the RIF process. That meant that a VERY significant part of our income time evaporated in the space of a few months.

To add to that, there were only about three kinds of jobs in town; College Staff (virtually impossible to get unless one had a PhD., even for non-teaching positions), Military (’nuff said), and Minimum Wage Flunkies. The Minimum Wage Flunkies were everywhere, since in a town with about 12,000 college kids, a significant percentage of them were always looking for work.

Law of Supply and Demand: High Supply, Low Demand. There were no jobs paying over minimum wage in a 50 mile radius of the town.

We tried, we REALLY tried. We slowly racked up the credit cards, living incrementally on those while we got farther and farther behind on the bills. We scoured the areas for jobs. I dropped out of school so I could get a full-time minimum-wage position at a local trucking company, while the wife picked up my paper route (yes, PAPER ROUTE) while looking for other work.

It just didn’t work. We finally decided to search for jobs in a nearby city, and found a couple of jobs that paid more than we were making in town, but the damage was already done. All the credit cards were maxed, and we were 6 months past due on the mortgage with NO possibility of coming up with the past-due amount.

We finally moved out and rented a small place in the nearby town. I remember signing the paperwork (A "Deed in Lieu of Foreclosure") and feeling like I’d just admitted to the world that I was a failure. It still sits as one of the low-points of my life.

..

It’s taken years to realize that we did all that we could do, and that we made a lot of stupid mistakes with our finances. It’s also taken years to get past that point and forgive ourselves for the situation.

When you identify so strongly with your belongings, you forget some basic truths. You are not your stuff. You don’t need your stuff. Life goes on WITHOUT stuff. It’s hard, since society impressed on everyone that ’status is everything’, and especially during my formative years in the 1980s (The Conspicious Consumption Era). BMW’s and Yuppies were the rage, and you’re value was defined by what you made and owned. I still catch myself judging my worth on my job and lifestyle sometimes.

So if you’re going through what we went through, just remember that you’re not unique, and that you’ll come through it someday, stronger and smarter for having survived. Learn from the mistakes and pass on the knowledge. That’s what keeps me going. 

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