Living After Foreclosure

If you look at the demeanor on the faces of the people over at YouWalkAway.com, you might think that getting foreclosed on is downright enjoyable.  A walk through the park with your spouse and child, as it were.

It even seems a bit empowering.  You don’t get foreclosed on; you walk away.  Kind of like “Take this house and shove it.”

Who wouldn’t be enticed by the prospect of “[living] payment free for up to 8 months or more and [walking] away without owing a penny?”  It’s more like you can be kicked out once things are official (it doesn’t have to be 8 months) and you’ll not owe but no lender will entertain lending you money again for a while at anything close to a good interest rate.  That, and it’s likely that you’ll feel like a failure.  (But that doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.)

The sizzle they’re selling is a brief period of peace of mind and the prospects of a fairly quick recovery.  The steak is hand-holding through a process that can be done for free, with the end result being the same: a foreclosure on the credit record, and a couple hundred points or more off of the credit score for a while.

If foreclosure is the only option, then it’s the only option.  I’m all for paying someone to solve problems, but paying someone almost a thousand bucks to alleviate things temporarily doesn’t really seem like a good deal.  And how people can justify the expense when it’s already clear they can’t afford their housing doesn’t make much sense either.