Unfortunately, that’s the sad reality of my current situation, as well as countless others who lost their jobs due to the mortgage debacle.

I’ve sent out about 200 resumes in the past 6 months and was pretty much offered 2 jobs in industries that I was not interested. Besides, both jobs had starting salaries of $30k a year, too low to support a couple in Los Angeles…with a baby due this fall.

I can’t seem to get an interview for a good company in an industry that I am interested in.

So, I took a part time job at an internet company making minimum wage, plus commissions. With commissions, I’ve been averaging about $11/hour, due to the 6 month old leads that we’re calling.
I am hanging on by a thread.

More income is needed, so the search is still on for another good part time job in addition to this one.

I finally got a part time gig to earn some extra money. It’s been a long time since I have had a paycheck that I just needed to get something to be in motion and make some money to pay for gas.

I will be working part time at a web company, something that I’ve wanted to do (work at a web company) to basically see how they operate and how they’re structured so when it comes time to create my own company, I will know how to execute the game plan.

I could’ve found work at a restaurant or coffee house or retail store, but my interest has, for the better part of the last decade, been to create my own web startup, so this should work out fine.

I want to see how they came from conception to execution and how they were able to raise seed money.

As far as the real estate market is concerned, there are now 262 lenders that have shut down, mortgage rates are still pretty high, an estimated 2 million foreclosures are slated for this year, and the government is really the only one funding loans, and their guidelines are just ridiculous.

So we ended up doing a short sale on our property to avoid having to go through foreclosure with our primary residence. That’s the good news.

The bad news is, our rental properties are going through foreclosure and those will be on my record.

I’m not that worried about it, in terms of credit, because there are so many different ways to acquire real estate with bad credit. But I won’t be motivated to acquire real estate any time soon. Maybe for a few years unless I see an offer I can’t refuse.

Money is still tight and we’re living day by day.

I have been living on been and cheese burritos for the past 5 days. They’re quite good actually, and they’re also cheap, easy, and the ingredients are organic.

Another reality being a foreclosure vicitm is that It’s tough to eat organically when you are broke.

Wholefoods grocery store is where I normally shop and it is outrageously priced, but eating mostly organic and natural foods these past few years, it’s made it mentally tough for me to shop at normal grocery stores like Ralphs and Vons again.

So, I just get what’s cheap and filling these days and right now that means bean and cheese burritos…

Right now, I am averaging 9 calls a day from various collectors. 

My old car loan company is still calling me after I have voluntarily given the car back.

What do they want? 

I have nothing! NOTHING! NADA!

Stop calling me! I have so many other things to worry about in my life like finding a job!

It’s so annoying because they leave messages with automated attendants and fill up my message box.

What I normally do when the phone rings is look at the incoming 800 number, then quickly go to Google and type in the number. This has been a blessing because there are a few sites that have a big community of people listing their experiences with these “800″ numbers.

They’ll list the exact number and start a topic underneath it. Then, if they actually answered the phonecall and had a conversation, they’ll detail their experience and list the collection company AND person they spoke with.

This is great news for people with collection accounts!

If you are getting calls too and don’t know who it is that is calling you, remember, first Google the number, or go here and enter a “mysterious number” that you feel is from a collection company- http://800notes.com/

Right now, I have approximately $150 in my account.

I am married and we’re expecting a baby, I haven’t found a good job worth giving my full attention, we’re living day to day right now, but I know that I will get a job soon. Even if it means serving lattes at the local Starbucks.

As the mortgage industry dried up, so did my client database. I can’t get people qualified for refinancing because their values have gown down, they don’t qualify, or there is no benefit to doing the refinance.

Luckily, I just closed a loan on a borrower that did qualify and it will give us enough to last the month of April.

I’m already late on Aprils rent and have asked the landlord to accept the 2nd half of the rent a week late. What choice does he have?

I went through my entire cash reserves the last half of 2007 trying to maintain my credit. Looking back, I should have just quit payments on EVERYTHING and kept my cash reserves. Bad credit was inevitable anyways.

Hopefully the market turns around soon. In the meantime, I’ll still pound the pavement looking for a new job, and if worse case scenario, there’s always a Starbucks close by…

Since business slowed down in the mortgage industry, my paychecks diminished, leaving me to exhaust my cash reserves and use it to live on and make my monthly payments. Everything from the house payment, credit cards, utilities, cell phone, cable/internet, negative cashflow on rental properties, etc….so why not be late on my car payments as well?!

My credit is already demolished, so what good would timely car payments be?

With that rationale, I stopped payments on my car. That’s over $500 a month that I don’t have to put out and can use for groceries.

Here’s the other side to that. Stopping car payments meant that at some point the repo man will pay a visit.

I’m pretty sure that they tried searching for us after about the 4th month (maybe sooner), but we had about 3 addresses that they would have to search on a daily basis, including a secured garage at one location and a padlocked one car garage out of a possible 5 garages that they would have to guess which one belonged to us.

I could’ve hung on to this car longer and just driven it “payment-free” for a few months longer, but other issues come along with that.
One main issue is, knowing that I would voluntarily return the car to the bank at some point, why continue to pay for the car insurance? That’s another $150 a month that I could keep in my pocket each month (well, not really, because I haven’t seen a paycheck in a while).
These are things that probably millions of other foreclosure victims are most likely going through as well.

Without insurance, I didn’t feel comfortable to drive, so my wife and I have been walking everywhere. The good news is, we’re within 15 minutes of everything that we need to survive. Grocery stores, theaters, bookstores, shopping, parks, etc…

We only took the car out sparingly to go grocery shopping (heavy stuff like water and milk and canned goods) since the insurance was cancelled on it.

I also took the car out when I had a couple of job interviews as well.

Despite our massive perfect storm that we’re currently living in, the good Lord is watching over us. I mean that sincerely.

My parents, who are retired and living on social security and pension and can barely afford to live in todays world, came to our rescue about 3 weeks ago and offered their 2nd car to us for however long we need to use it, and gave us enough money to pay for a months rent and some food.

God bless them. I know they don’t have much money, because I did their refinance 2 years ago, with some cashout, and I know that they went through the money already. So, where they got the money they gave us, I don’t know. Maybe they borrowed it from credit cards. Knowing mom, I bet that’s what she did.

I’ll get the money back to them as soon as I can (with massive interest as well).

So, having been given my parents 2nd car (free and clear of any car loan), my wife and I are at a little bit of ease. We can do our grocery shopping at anytime of the day and not have to worry about not having car insurance and not being followed by the repo man.

To recap, defaulting on your mortgage, means defaulting on credit cards, utilities, cell phone bills, cable/internet, car payments, car insurance, medical insurance (which I also recently canceled due to being a victim of the mortgage crisis also), and a bunch of other things that aren’t coming to mind just yet.

In any event, it was a nice luxury sports car that I do miss…but I won’t miss that payment. R.I.P. luxury sports car…

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I am currently going through the process of foreclosure with several properties including my house.

Once you decide that you just can’t pay the mortgage anymore and you miss that first payment AND you know that you won’t be able to catch up with the overdue payment as well as the current payment, you start to rationalize why you shouldn’t pay anything else (like you credit card payment, car payments, etc…)

For the past 7 months, I get no less than 20 calls from lenders and collection agencies. My parents, whose numbers are also on standard loan documents, screen all of their phone calls now because my lenders call them like crazy looking for me.

When I first missed the payments, I called the lenders and asked what they could do. I wanted to make partial payments and catch up when in a couple of months, without it showing as a “30 day late” on my credit report. They said that if I make partial payments, they’ll hold it until I send the rest of the money that equals the total amount, then apply it as a full payment.

Bottom line, partial payments equal “late payments” on your credit report. I also got so late on my car payments that I was locking my car in our one-car garage and would only take out the car to go to the grocery store, church, and a few doctors appointments.

We’ve done a whole heckuvalot of walking in the past few months, that’s for sure. The collection companies started calling me as early as 5 a.m. Perhaps because I never answer their calls in the first place and I never return their messages.

Some even leave messages that are vague like “Hi, Mr. X, This is Aaron at the office. I need you to call me back as soon as possible at 800-blah-blah.”

Forget it. My credit is royally screwed, I am jobless (currently looking for work), got a baby on the way, and I’m so broke that I can’t even pay attention. So why bother calling them back?

I am this close to changing my number, but I am late on my phone bill too and I know that I won’t get approved at a new cell phone provider, so there goes that idea.

For now, I must live with my daily rounds of collection companies calling throughout the day.

Thank God for the “vibration” feature on my cell phone!     

I am in foreclosure. I never thought that it would happen to me, but it did. In the midst of the highest amount of foreclosures in history, I got caught up in the mix, adding my name to the historical foreclosure list. And not just once…thanks to a failed attempt to own rental property in a soaring real estate market that went BUST in an instant.

How did this happen? I’m a smart guy. I have skills in many aspects of real estate. I bought a property almost 20 yrs ago, “nothing down” and rented it out for 5 years, surely I can make it happen and claim my fortune in this soaring real estate market. So I thought…

I’ll get to my rental properties later, for now, the story of my current situation.For the past few years, I’ve made a living in the mortgage industry. Times were great when I got in as everyone that had any kind of equity were refinancing and cashing out their equity. Money was great and business was good.

Making great money allowed my wife and I to eat well, travel, buy a bunch of things that we never had the luxury to buy before getting into the industry, buy a new luxury sports car, and to buy a very nice home in a great area in Los Angeles, next to Beverly Hills.We lived there for the next 2 3/4 yrs before the reality of the real estate bubble took a major hit by big mortgage lenders going down, thus eliminating many mortgage programs that once prevailed leaving few mortgage programs left…with much stricter guidelines.

This led to a dry up in the refinance boom and put many mortgage loan officers out of business, scrambling around looking for a new career with similar type of pay.

Take it from me, changing careers and finding something with great pay isn’t that easy. I’ve been in sales all of my life, and finding a sales job is easy. But I don’t just want to do any ordinary sales job. I’m looking for a new career in a respectable industry that shows promise with serious upward mobility.

I’ve been looking around for a couple of months and have had recruiters from different industries call me, but so far nothing grabs me passionately.

I’m the type of guy that needs to be really passionate about what I am involved in, otherwise, I won’t put my all into it.

Following this blog, you’ll learn what’s its like going through the foreclosure process.