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.

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