Reply #10: I'll tell you one story...

[lapfog_1]

A good friend of mine. And a very sad story.

He has worked hard for 17 years, almost all of them at one company, moved his way up the ranks to manager.

He got married to a beautiful girl, she was 28, he was 35... 5 years ago. She worked hard, he worked hard. She
was a legal immigrant from Vietnam, he is from Sri Lanka. Both were US citizens. Her one dream, an American dream, was to buy a house. 2 years after they were married, she was diagnosed with cancer, a rapid form of lymphoma.

He bought a house 1 year later so she could have a small flower garden and gaze at it from her living room couch,
given that she couldn't go outdoors while in chemo, nor could she have visitors.

She died less than 6 months later. The insurance didn't cover everything, including her traditional homeopathic
treatments... to their credit, his company insurance did pay over $1M to try to keep her alive. He paid another
$120,000... but he had to empty his savings completely, cash in his 401K, take up donations at work, and borrow
from friends and family. And he remortgaged his house that he had put 20% down and had a fixed rate 30 year. Now
he has a 100% ARM... and it's reset once already. They also cashed in both of their life
insurance policies to help pay the medical bills.

So there he is, living alone in a house that he can't afford. He just took a 15% pay cut (as all employees did), and he now has a roommate... but he lives in a very sad place. And the house is now worth 2/3rds of what he paid
for it 3 years ago. And he is late with his mortgage. He has cut every expense. No internet, no cable. The thermostat is set to 62 in the winter and 85 in the summer. He cooks every meal at home... and it's mostly rice
and beans with a little chicken or whatever is cheap. He drives a 12 year old Camry with 200K miles.

If he can save his house... if... this is what he has to look forward to for next N years... That's if
he can keep his job AND the company doesn't go broke.

A mortgage reset would help, a housing rebound would help more (he would sell it for what he owes, or even
take a loss, but the loss now is $100K and he doesn't have it).

Otherwise, it's jingle mail time (like the houses on either side of his).

He tells me that he wants enough money to buy the burial plot next to his wife... and that's all he wants now.

I hope he qualifies for some sort of bailout/reset/assistance. But I have no way of knowing if he will.


I'm sure some libertarian Ayn Rand type will be along shortly to say what a deadbeat he is, how he shouldn't have
bought a house, that he should have kept the life insurance policy, or that he deserves bankruptcy for his
"mistake" of buying his dying wife the house she wanted...