Reading the Newspaper Can Break Your Heart

OK, I'm weird. I always read the "Legals" in the back of the Classifieds. It announces whose will is going into probate, adoptions, what the city council is up to, openings for contractors to bid on shit.....and mortgage foreclosures.

In my hometown paper (I don't know if this is standard or not), they list the date the mortgage was closed.

Thanks to * and his inept handling of the economy, the Legals section gets longer and longer....mostly foreclosures.

Some folks I know of (friends of friends) are losing their house. They closed on their mortgage in 1974!!!! They're 29 years into their 30-year mortgage!! I called our mutual friend, and he said they got a couple of months behind, and the bank is repossessing the place.

They've lived in that place a lot longer than I've been alive. That has got to be GUT-WRENCHING -- that's not losing your house, that's losing your HOME.

Why do assholes always win the lottery? If I won, I'd go around changing people's lives. Paying off mortgages. Preventing bankruptcies. Sigh.

Thanks for listening to me rant.

payments so they don't lose the place? That's such a shame.

it is not likely that they will be able to afford housing at all.

Apartments rent for much more than the average mortgage payment was in 1974.

probably a second, even third mortgage...
else they could sell the house outright, use their equity to buy a more modest place...

I'm not sayin anything, just trying to logically figure out how you could lose a house that is all but paid for.

Lots of people have had to do that just to get past one serious health care situation, and gone from the frying pan to the fire.

I assumed they had a year's worth of 1975-type mortgage payments to make, and they had just fallen behind a couple of payments, as SGWriter described. No mention was made of any other mortgages.

SGWriter, do they have more than one mortgage? What's the story? We have a friend who nearly lost his house 2 years ago, and we all chipped in to pay a couple of payments. As soon as he was able to go on SS at age 65 this year, things are OK for him.