It is always a little disheartening to read and hear about homeowners who treated their homes as if they were a giant ATM machine and could pull out a few thousand dollars whenever they needed. This gambling on the value of a home to pay off past, present, and future debt is one of the main contributing factors to the current foreclosure situation, and it was a factor that wholely avoidable. The missing counterbalance was simply education for homeowners on the actual use of a house.
The necessary lesson can be summed up in a single sentence: a home is a place to live in,
not a slot machine that periodically pays off every few years. Given a choice to pay off the mortgage completely and own a home free and clear, or keep going further and further in household debt while increasing the amount of money is costs to pay back that debt, it is amazing that homeowner chose the second of the two possibilities. Instead of eliminating their mortgage payment completely, they chose to increase it stedily over time, to keep up with their own rising consumption rate. This is, frankly, crazy.
Now that the bills are coming due, many homeowners are realizing that their house is more important to them as a place to live, even as they desperately try to use it as a bank one last time to hold onto it and remain living there. But with so many others facing the same problems of rising payments and falling home values, these homeowners are unable to stop foreclosure from taking away both their homes and their equity.
What is even more disturbing is the fact that foreclosure victims are made to feel as if they are alone in this situation. This is exacerbated by the fact that almost
no one is talking about the dangerous atmosphere in the housing market ; in fact, many ""authorities"" are talking up the rebound in the housing market as if it actually exists. Besides a few isolated areas of the country in which housing prices are rising or holding steady, there is a
general decrease in property values this year, the first since 1990-1991. This time, there are no huge bank failures or a meltdown of the Savings and Loan industry to blame it on. And with even more Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) about to reset this year,
the devestation may just be in its initial stages .
Homeowners are not alone in their quest to stop foreclosure and save their homes. They should seek out the best foreclo sure information that they can find, and put together the best plan to work with their lender or get a fresh start. But this is also a time that foreclosure victims should take a careful examination of their situations and work towards viewing their home as their place to live, and making sure they own as much of it as quickly as they can. Treating a house as if it was a bank or ATM machine will only cause more problems the next time the machine runs out of money.
About the author: ForeclosureFish.com is a website that was designed to help homeowners find as much foreclo sure information as they need to save their homes on their own. Visit their website today and download a free e-book and learn how to stop foreclosure: http://www.foreclosurefish.com/
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