I am in complete desperation mode at this moment. Nothing like waking up and learning you have a few hours to come up with an impossible amount of money to save your home and find yourself out on the street...but that is what happened today. I honestly have no clue as to why I am submitting this as my first diary other than the fact I am desperate and need to put this out for the world to see and hope to whatever gods there my be for a miracle as I get my thoughts together in our crisis that will come to complete fruition in about 6 hours...
Life takes some dramatic dramatic turns, as we all know. Illness, loss of jobs, a bad decision here or there...so many of us have been there, and as we go on about our lives and read of so many terrible situations, sometimes we never expect to be blindsided or stick out heads in the sand and pretend the most dire of situations will not come to pass. However, when you don't even know that disaster is coming, it is tough to find a happy ending, and I don't even know that it was any particularly dramatic even that brought my little family to this point, or just the fact we have been so focused on daily survival to keep out power on and food on the table that the situation we are in today is merely a cosmic kick in the ass and the end result is that we will be utterly homeless.
It seems as though our home was sold in a property tax auction last Year, and I will honestly say we had no idea it happened. We had one year to come up with the money, of course to save our property, and we could have had we known it happened, but we didn't. This morning my husband received a note from the man who purchased our home to take possession of it after today.
To back up a bit, we know we were a year behind on our taxes with the house but planned to use our tax refund to pay it off, and hoped to at least pay part of our tax burden next month fo the second installment this year. (at least the little we could so they would know we weren't complete slackers.) Of course would have taken action and made arrangements to take care of the bill prior to now if we had known it was to this point. We just missed it.
My husband of 17 years works so hard to bring in money for our life. I adore him for it and I have chosen to stay home and school our 8 year old daughter since traditional schooling wasn't a good fit for her. We both went back to college to improve out lives and besides the mountain of debt we ran up to improve our lot in life we struggle to get by on my husband's salary. Our cars are dead, and thanks to friends we have been able to use theirs so Stephen can get to and from his less than ideal job, but that is about it. He just got a promotion at work and a little raise, so we were hopeful we could begin to get out from under our financial struggles.
The one this we were always able to know was that our home was paid off and we didn't have to pay a mortgage or rent since I inherited this house from my parents upon their passing some years ago. Yes, I worried that not being able to afford life insurance was tempting fate against disaster, but I never imagined that we would lose the house because we didn't get word that our house was sold for a few thousand dollars and or county doesn't bother to let people know by anything but a letter that we did not see 12 months ago, if it ever arrived.(I know it sounds crazy, but we did not know this was going to happen as we tried to prepare for our Fall tax installment due late next month.)
So now, thanks to the empathy of our county, we have to come up with $2,657 (thank you, daily interest) by 5:00 P.M. eastern time today or we will be forced out of our paid for home and have no where to go. My wonderful husband managed to find $2300 already, but we have run out of options, since out family and support networks have shrunk considerably over the past few years, there is also little to sell off quickly because we have already done that. Credit is not an option thanks to juggling bills through the years and a mountain of deferred student loans. I simply don't know what else to do and I will probably be banned from here for this ,but it won't matter much after this afternoon if I don't have a home anyway.
What do we do? His paycheck won't pay for a decent place to live if this happens and we have no where to turn? How does it get to this? How do people get out fro under things like this when there is no one to help in an emergency? Please pray for us or something...I am at my wit's end and am trying to be brave for my sweet angel of a daughter because of course in the middle of all of this she overheard what is happening and is fretting, I just don't know who else to turn to and needed to get these words out to complete strangers I suppose to prepare for the reality.
11:38 AM PT: I am now out of options at the moment. Thanks to all who replied and rec'ed the diary to help try to get us some more exposure.
5:09 PM PT: What a day! Now that the deadline has passed, we are making a plan to find out our next moves and what options we have. Moods have stabilized in my family and we have now entered action mode. Again thanks for the recs and assistance. You all made the day bearable and gave us some direction and comfort. - Lisa and Stephen