Moving, The Odyssey of Foreclosures

I’ve written a couple of jocular little posts recently about moving; on the last one I promised to explain why we were moving. Again.

I will first lead you over to my archives. Over there on the right hand side of the page. Start with January 2010. I started posting then about our foreclosure. Walking away from our seriously underwater home in Stockton, California. My husband and I had lived in Southern California for five years and moved back up to Northern California at the end of 2006 for a job opportunity for my husband.

We bought a home in Stockton, relatively near our kids, and thought this would be our retirement nest egg. A place that we could eventually sell after gaining a little equity.

The bubble burst. Actually, it exploded. Our retirement nest egg was sinking rapidly to the point of my husband saying we needed a submarine to get to the front door.

Stockton was is one of the cities with more foreclosures than most other cities in the United States. It is also the city with one of the highest crime rates in the U.S., or maybe the highest. But there we were.

Sizing up the situation, and after much soul-searching, we decided to walk away. Our home had sunk beyond any possibility of re-gaining any equity in our lifetime. Reading my archived posts will reveal a lot of my thoughts and the day to day happenings at the time, the foreclosure process in California, and links to foreclosure information.

We moved to a beautiful little community about 40 minutes away from Stockton and leased a little casita. We were up front with the landlord about our foreclosure and were told it seemed to be more the norm than not, and we were welcomed with open arms.

Nine months later our landlord called one night and asked to come over to talk. We knew. Immediately we knew. They were foreclosing on the home, even though they had told us when we signed the lease that they would never do that.

So here we went again…..moving. One more time. We were able to stay in the same community that we have grown to love. We are renting again….why would we want to buy a house in this real estate market at our age (64).  Seriously, a 30 year mortgage?

It’s a crap shoot. We may go through this all over again. We’re all in.