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The $1450/month presumably includes taxes and insurance. Most of the Philly suburbs in which you could buy that large a house, even in poor condition for $120,000 are super high tax counties (and you can be sure the taxes went up during the bubble and haven’t come back down) — the few who are actually paying taxes are forced to support the massive non-taxpaying underclass. In addition, given the age and condition of the house, there’s no way she could get/keep a standard insurance policy on it, so she’s probably stuck with very expensive insurance. Some insurance companies are quick to issue a policy in connection with an initial home purchase, and don’t even bother sending anyone to look at it — then they send someone around a year or so later, and send you a letter demanding thousands of dollars in repairs and upgrades, and cancel the policy if you don’t do them by the demanded date. A couple of years later, they send someone by again and pull the same stunt, demanding repairs and upgrades to things that are exactly the same as last time but weren’t mentioned at all then. Easily a third of that $1450/month could be taxes and insurance — possibly more. And she may have spent a lot of the $54,000 on repairs the insurer demanded, in addition to medical bills for one of the children.

The insurance BS is getting out of control, especially with certain insurers, and this woman doesn’t strike me as sophisticated enough to deal with it effectively. I have two homes in Pennsylvania, both 100+ years old — one is my main residence that I’ve had for 20 years in one of the nicer Philly suburbs, the other is a vacation home in the Poconos which I’ve had for 8 years. I’ve had the same insurer on the first home for the whole 20 years with NO claims, but they just issued me a non-renewal notice after I told them to go jump in a lake with their latest round of idiotic demands — e.g. paint the shed, which is an accessory structure specifically excluded from the coverage, and several other silly demands, yet no request to replace or even just re-shingle the roof of the house, which urgently needs it, and is now in the process of getting it all the way down to replacing all the wood underneath the shingles and adding insulation — i.e. I’m spending $10,000 to do something that’s seriously needed to prevent water damage to the house for the next 30 years, but they want to cancel my policy because I won’t paint the little shed which I plan to replace entirely in a couple of years. They cancelled the policy on the Poconos house a couple of years back, after I finally drew a line in the sand over this sort of nonsense, and I had no trouble replacing it with a policy from a saner insurer. Amazingly, my about to be ex-insurer has never had (nor requested access for) one of their eagle-eyed inspectors inside either of these houses — they just show up when no one’s home, walk around the house and write down a bunch of random stuff to prove to their boss that they’ve actually been there. Heck, if this lady in the article was home when they showed up, she could have spent the whole $54,000 on stupid stuff they demanded, and STILL have “The main toilet is broken upstairs; the roof is leaking into the kitchen ceiling, the ceiling is falling down. The floor in the back room is coming apart”, because none of those things were on the list of repairs demanded and made.

ltc8k6: re “what has the bank been doing since September 2008?” Answer: Counting their blessings that she’s been staying in the house and not trashing it herself or leaving it empty to be trashed and stripped by vandals — they’ve seen what’s happened to homes they foreclosed on after the ex-owners moved out, and they’re not eager to see more of that. We’re talking right next door to Philadelphia here.