Posted on 06/07/2004 9:53:30 AM PDT by Willie Green
The cleaning crew and real estate agent arrived early. An Allegheny County Sheriff's deputy was there, too, watching Joyce and Konrad Schachner run back and forth from their North Side home of five years to the U-Haul truck that now carried their lives.
"Why are the cops here, Mom?" asked 5-year-old Konrad Jr., standing wide-eyed in front of his house on Van Buren Street.
"Because we gotta go," she answered. "I told you, we gotta go."
And within 45 minutes the Schachners were gone, driving to a relative's home for lack of other options. In the wake of their eviction, everything they decided to leave behind -- toys, furniture, clothing -- had been discarded.
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
ping
Coming soon to a town near you.
The real estate bubble is overdue for the big pop.
Schachner, 40, said they immediately fell behind in their bills. In 2001, they filed Chapter 13 bankruptcy, which allowed them to keep the house and establish a debt repayment plan through a trustee appointed by the bankruptcy court. Two years later, the Schachners were forced to file Chapter 13 again, but this time they couldn't afford the payments.
They failed to pay municipal taxes for three years and by the time they contacted The Associates to work out a payment plan, it was too late.
Ooops! I guess ignorance is not bliss.
Darn lenders wanting their money back. You take away the ability for lenders to put higher cost mortgages in place you will take away their interest in financing higher risk loans. This is where Fannie and Freddie are just starting to pick up the slack with lower downpayments and credit scores. They will of course have - surprise - higher delinquencies. Good post.
Welcome to Allegheny County, rapidly taxing itself into oblivion.
Problem: Secured subprime mortgage loan. Didn't realize taxes were over and above their monthly payment.
Status: Renting North Side apartment. Working and hoping to buy another home.
Quote: "[The lenders] don't care. They just want their money."
I wonder if she will vote for Kerry and even higher taxes...
1000 / 12 = 83.34
Mortgage = 456
Could someone actually buy a house without knowing what their payment would be when taxes and insurance were added in? Crikey, I couldn't really get a mortgage for under a Grand a month where I live, and that's before taxes and fees. Good cautionary tale though. The prevailing wisdom is that it's always better to own than rent, but it's not always true.
Good post !
Doubt it but if so, that means there will be alot of deals out there. Great time to buy if it goes under.
In Harris County Tx we pay alot more in taxes. We just had a special seccion of the legistlature to deal with it. They locked, another one is coming.
Darn lenders wanting their money back. You take away the ability for lenders to put higher cost mortgages in place you will take away their interest in financing higher risk loans. This is where Fannie and Freddie are just starting to pick up the slack with lower downpayments and credit scores. They will of course have - surprise - higher delinquencies. Good post.
Blame it on the lenders. No personal responsibility anymore.
Well, it is - but only for a limited time.
FYI
Well, don't move to Illinois. We hold the record for the most taxing bodies in the entire country. We have state, county, city, and township taxes, and the governor will not allow tax caps.
I'm curios how they got a loan with no PMI or escrow for the taxes..
I maybe moving out of Illinois real soon.. It is getting expensive to live in this state...
Six months ago, I bought a house for $428,000 here in Woodland Hills, a nice Los Angeles suburb. This is known as an "entry level" house, or a "steal" in our vernacular. To give you an idea of how much of a steal it is, three different real estate agents have told me it would sell for at least $550,000 today.
You can't rent a single apartment here for the $539.33 their mortgage was including the monthly cost of property taxes. My mortgage, at 100% financing, is $2,750 a month. I can only say they got a horrible deal, since their house cost almost exactly 10% what mine did; my payment would have been $4,400 a month (!) at the same interest rate.
If the process is anything like what I went through to buy my house, they'd have to be pretty dumb not to know what the property taxes would be and how much the total cost with property taxes were. I had this on a spreadsheet that I updated frequently during the buying process.
I'm afraid the lesson is that people who aren't reasonably knowledgeable about the workings of mid-finance have no business buying homes :-(.
D
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