Thread: When should we get a place?, ready to stop mortgage payment, will try...

...short sale/ deed in leiu of foreclosure? Upside down, can hardly make mortgage payment so we want to get out of this house. We'll try to sell it as short sale or deed in leiu of foreclosure with a Realtor. My question is should we stop making payment starting now and try to stay here for a few months while bank is processing short sale/ deed in leiu or should we get a place now before credit hit and move out in a few weeks? We don't even have 1st, last deposit for the rent so we would like to save some money as much as we can but if we wait until later to get a place, our credit will be ruined, right? When do our credit report show our non payment ? A month or later after the non payment? Thanks.

Why don't you call your lender and ask these questions. Only they can tell you what they will actually do. I went through this in a similarly crappy real estate marked in the early 1990's. The bank would do NOTHING to help us. They would not accept a short payoff or a deed in lieu. We ended up claiming bankruptcy because the value of our 80k house had dropped to 60k and we HAD to move due to a loss of employment. (New job was 1 hour 40 mins away.) Bank couldn't have cared less, and the funny thing is the stupid house sat vacant for something like three years. Too bad - we had gotten a 60k offer and they did not want it. Dumb@sses!

I don't know what the bankruptcy laws are these days but you may be better off staying in the home as long as you can and then just letting them take it.

Sorry for your trouble. I know how hard it is - but you'll be ok in a few years! Trust me, things turn around.

PS and one more thing - try not to beat yourself up too much over this. Someone either A - grossly over appraised your home to get you financed (this is what happened to us) or B - put you into some type of interest only or other "junk" loan so they could make a buck. The lenders are only getting what they deserve. Trust me, they don't care about you at all - don't kill yourself trying to make one more payment. That $ means more to you than it ever will to them.

I don't usually preach that it's good to walk away from your debts but so many consumers are at an awful disadvantage when dealing with mortgage brokers and banks...I guess I just feel like most of the time it's the borrower who has been swindled - and the banks try to make YOU feel like dirt about it.

Hang in there.

Most banks report late payments within 30 days as well as most major creditors. Have you tried talking to the bank to see if they would work with you on the payments? I have a rental I late payments is one of the first things that I check on the credit report. It tells me that if you can't pay your bills that you probably won't pay rent either.