Living After Foreclosure

How about losing nine homes to foreclosure?

Ouch. It must be harsh to go from $800k in stock options to losing that, your home, your car, and your credit rating. And having a newborn on top of that.

Shawn Forgaard went in full steam to real estate hot spots, financed them with a lot of money down and negative-amortization financing, and missed the signs that the market was turning against him.

So there was that side of the equation: a speculator that got in over his head after greed got the better of him. On the other side were the banks that lent him the money to fuel his speculation. Greed got the better of them, too.

This downturn is going to humiliate a lot of people. It sounds as if Mr. Forgaard is a bit wiser now. The School of Hard Knocks is a rough teacher, but an effective one, probably.

• Vacant home burglaries result in costly repairs Fifteen to twenty thousand dollars in repairs because thieves stole $40 worth of copper? Ouch. That was a bit more than I would have guessed. Maybe a couple thousand at the most to repair a wall or some floors? Not $20,000! Very costly repairs like this will drag down housing......
• Virulent foreclosure side effects Foreclosures are making people sick.  Literally.  It's possible that there is a link between the West Nile virus and foreclosed properties, particularly properties with swimming pools that become standing water once abandoned and provide a home to lots of mosquitoes. Falling property values in neighborhoods with abandoned houses makes sense. ......
• Steps to take if you’re facing foreclosure, Part 3 Here's the last installment of Liz Pulliam Weston's tips for dealing with the possibility of foreclosure: Offer a deed in lieu of foreclosure. This is an option if the shortfall between your house's value and what's owed on it isn't too much.  The lender can say, "Yeah, I'll take the......
• Steps to take if you're facing foreclosure, Part 1 Liz Pulliam Weston wrote recently on steps to take if you're facing foreclosure.  There are smart ways to go about it, and not-so-smart ways.  Here are her first three suggestions with some of my comments: Make a budget.  If there are places that can be cut in your budget that......

• More Tips for Serving Here are some more useful tennis tips for improving your serving game. If you want to make improvements in your ability to serve, these tips will prove useful. Tip #1: Be a little off center after your serve. When you are serving wide to your opponent in order to......
• A New Kind Of Nigerian Scam? I recently got an email from a reader that I think I should share with you. It involves a new kind of scam and you need to be aware of it.Hi: I have a question regarding real estate fraud. I have an ad on a website selling my property (for......
• Epic Wimbledon Final Recap The epic Wimbledon final that happened last Sunday between Roger Federer and Andy Roddick has been ruled as the most viewed of all men's finals at the All England Club in the past ten years. According to NBC last Thursday, an average of 5.71 million people had tuned in, in......
• Online Money Fraud Hits Home Online money fraud is a threat to every family, even those like mine that try to be careful in everything financial.  Here is what happened. Yesterday my youngest son called me about purchasing a used XBOX 360 game console on eBay.  I told him that it was not how I......