I bought the home in 1989 while I was making a fair living as a furniture salesman. I had an FHA loan at the time, and could afford the payments easily. I lost my job in 1990 when the furniture market declined, and started the process to get my real estate license (amazing the parallels to today). While working on my license I took a job working night as a Nurses Aide in an elderly care facility to pay my bills, and afterward kept the night job while I tried to sell houses during the day.
I learned I preferred washing asses to kissing them for a living (sorry SDR and sdr, and I posted in an earlier thread how I got out of real estate), so I decided health care was the life for me. I enrolled at Penn State as a 25 year-old undergrad in 1991, lived in the home for the first year, but found the payments were getting too tough to keep up with, so I moved in with my brother and rented the place out for a year. The tenants trashed the place, and left me with $2000 in unpaid gas and electric bills which took me two years to pay off. In the meantime the housing market declined and the house was worth less than I had paid for it, and still owed. I calculated that selling the home at current market value would have required I bring at least $7500 to the table, which was money I didn’t have at the time. I made the logical decision to walk away and live with the consequences.
For those that think I should have dropped out of school and make good on my debts, you have a valid point. But if I hadn’t made the decision I did, I’m quite certain I wouldn’t be where I am today. I think what happened to me is going to happen to a lot of people, just to a much larger extent. Remember, the house I bought was only $42,000, but the fundamentals will prove to hold just as true today as they did back then.
