Bottom line America, foreclosures cause severe stress, drug and alcohol abuse, crime, divorce, domestic violence, homelessness, child neglect and for some who face foreclosure , death. This is no laughing American matter and foreclosure should not be wished on anyone.
So what if a person has made a real estate or mortgage mistake. People need to get over that “blame” mentality and we need to move on to solutions.
I would like to disclose to my readers that I have have faced foreclosure and suffered financially many times in my life. I understand what it feels like in this situation and I speak from experience. The loneliness, sleepness nights, the daily instability and the unknown of what the future holds is enough to make you mad.
Foreclosure and personal financial crisis are some of the most stressful situations that a human being can go through. Especially when you are a caring father or mother with a family who depends on you to eat and to have a roof over their head.
The stress and shame is sometimes too much for some people to take. Many make it through their financial calamities only to have their children also suffer from the after affects of foreclosure and or bankruptcy.
I want to let you know that this stress that your going through WILL END. ONLY time will help heal your financial and housing woes. You really have to understand that the money in your pocket and the roof over your head DOES NOT determine who you are as a person and does not define your future. It may seem like there may be no way out now, but there is.
Please trust me. I am a living testament that you can come out of terrible financial situation and come out even better than before.
This may be a blessing in disguise for you and your family. Maybe you should take these signals and adjust your lifestyle? Maybe you should live with less and downsize your life in order to have a cozy existence with those that you love?
Because in the end, nothing means more to a man and woman than their kids and family. Right?
If you lose your home or money, I can bet you that your wife, husband and children WILL LOVE you just the same. It may not seem like that now, but they will love you just the same in that home your in now or another home down the street or even a 1 bedroom apartment near the school will make your family happy. Heck, you may have to move back in with family, but at least you will all be together and that is what it is ALL about.
I have been in your shoes financially many times before. As a man and father of 4 kids, there were time I had wanted to end my financial misery. It took me years, but I made it out by starting this blog and my forum at LoanSafe.org. I put my depression and stress into my work and used it as fuel for my projects. Instead of fuel for my misery.
The only way I made it out of my financial depression was by paying it forward and helping people. By doing something with my time instead of dwelling in my head. Hope for the best in life, BUT ALWAYS plan for the worst. That way you have your bases covered and you have hope no matter what happens to you and your family.
If you have back up plans and work on them daily, then you create hope and that will motivate you to keep fighting and working towards new endeavors. In the end, you and your family will be OK.
The reason I am referencing these news articles below is because these people did not make it through their financial and foreclosure stresses. You have to understand that suicide is very selfish and it leaves the people you love to suffer even more for the wreckage that you leave behind. It is BY NO WAY a means to an end, but a new beginning of misery for those you leave behind.
Toughen up, get into action and understand that time and hard work will heal your “superficial” financial wounds. You just need to give it, TIME AND WORK!
He didn’t let anybody know what was happening,” said Shani Ross, one of Adams’ daughters.
The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, which under state law assists in evictions, serves two to 10 evictions a day, Lt. Lari Sevene said. The office posted warning of Anderson’s eviction several days earlier and had no reason to fear trouble when they went to Anderson’s house Wednesday morning, she said.
The deputy knocked on his door just before 8 a.m. Wednesday, accompanied by a real estate agent working with the bank that foreclosed on his home.
Anderson didn’t open the door. Deputies heard him ask, “What?” and the deputy repeated himself.
Anderson went upstairs into the living room, sat on the couch and shot himself with a pistol, Sevene said.
Sheriff’s SWAT officers found his body when they forced their way into the home.
Another natural casualty of the foreclosure crisis is the kids. Kids who will be the future leaders and builders of our world.
Columbia Dispatch – Man Kills Father and Than Himself Over Foreclosure:
PATASKALA — Neighbors say a man who killed his dad and then himself was struggling financially and overwhelmed with caring for his elderly father.
Police say Jeffrey P. McKnight, 53, of 57 Amber Rd. in Pataskala, set his house ablaze Tuesday afternoon. He then drove to where he had been staying with his father, 94-year-old Charles E. McKnight, at 7048 Summit Rd. in Pataskala, and fatally stabbed him before shooting himself.
Mickey Lymon, an investigator with the Licking County coroner’s office, confirmed that the elder McKnight had died of a stab wound to the chest. The son died of two gunshot wounds, one to the chest and one to the head. Both appear to be self-inflicted, Lymon said.
Standing outside the charred remains of the Amber Road home yesterday, neighbor Arlene Fest said Jeffrey McKnight mostly kept to himself but was quick to help out in the neighborhood by plowing snow and doing yard work.
Boston Globe - Facing foreclosure, Taunton woman commits suicide:
The housing crunch has caused anguish and anxiety for millions of Americans. For Carlene Balderrama, a 53-year-old wife and mother, the pressure was apparently too much to bear.
Police say that Balderrama shot herself Tuesday afternoon 90 minutes before her foreclosed home on Duffy Drive was scheduled to be sold at auction. Chief Raymond O’Berg said that Balderrama faxed a letter to her mortgage company at 2:30 p.m., telling them that “by the time they foreclosed on the house today she’d be dead.”
The mortgage company notified police, who found her body at 3:30 p.m. The auction had been scheduled to start at 5 p.m. Balderrama used her husband’s high-powered rifle, O’Berg said.
She left a note for her family saying they should “take the [life] insurance money and pay for the house,” O’Berg said.
Over ten thousand public school students homeless in Chicago:
Even before the collapse of the US economy in the fall of 2008, increasing social misery had taken its toll on Chicago-area students, with thousands forced to leave their homes and enter into a variety of precarious and temporary living arrangements. Recent months have only seen a further deterioration in the living situations of many area families.
As of the end of the 2008 school year last June, the number of students identified as homeless in figures reported by Chicago Public Schools (CPS) was 10,642, a record. That figure represented a 1.2 percent increase from 2006. However, from November 2007 to November 2008 CPS reported a staggering 28 percent rise in the number of homeless students, so the figure for the 2009 school year will undoubtedly be even higher
CNN – Children of Foreclosure Falling Behind in School:
MODESTO, California (CNN) — Some of the people hit hardest by this bad economy are the youngest. Almost 2 million children nationwide have had or will have their lives disrupted by home foreclosures, according to one study.
There are more empty desks in Suzell Tougas’s fourth grade classroom after 10 students have stopped coming.There are more empty desks in Suzell Tougas’s fourth grade classroom after 10 students have stopped coming.
These are the children whose families have had to move, sometimes more than once. The youngsters are pulled out of school, often leaving their friends behind without even saying goodbye.Nine-year-old Kenia, who is in the fourth grade at Fairview Elementary School in Modesto, California, said that is what happened to her. She is new to the school, having moved to the area just a few months ago. She said it is really hard and she misses her friends.
Her classmate Bethany said her best friend since kindergarten just left without saying goodbye.
Heather Sharp, the principal at Fairview, said her school has been the one most affected by the bad economy in the Modesto City School system.
“We have, over the last couple of months, 50 students coming new to the school and 50 students leaving,” Sharp said.
It was so bad that the school conducted a door-to-door search for missing students, she said.
“We had our community aide going out to houses. And they were boarded up, windows boarded, yard brown. She had to go to neighbors to find out where the kids were.”
In terms of raw numbers, California had the most foreclosures of any state from 2007 through January 2009. More than 57,000 homes entered foreclosure. Many of those were in Stanislaus County, where home prices have declined 65 percent since December 2005, according to the Modesto Bee.
Read my blog posts from ths past on the social impacts of foreclosure:
Foreclosure Related Suicide and Murders on the Rise
Stress is a huge factor in suicide, and looming very large is stress related to the economy,” said Dr. Charles Nemeroff, chairman of psychiatry at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., and president of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
“Suicide is certainly a response to hard economic times,” noted Dr. Harold Koenig, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. “Consider what happened when the stock market fell in 1929. There was a rash of suicides.”
The Social Impact of Foreclosures: Homelessness, Crime & Death
For millions, the American Dream has become the “American Nightmare”. Many people have lost their jobs, their mortgages have become cancerous and they can no longer pay the loan on their overvalued homes.
The social impact of these foreclosures is reaching every “dark” nook and cranny in almost every city in the country. Homelessness, domestic abuse, crime, violence and instability are rising in many communities as hundreds of thousands of homes go on the foreclosure auction block.
This is all happening in a country where if a child eats a hamburger and gets sick, there is a nationwide recall of the tainted and toxic meat and the company that sold this beef is put out of business. This is from the same country where people are literally dying from these toxic mortgages and millions more are being kicked out of their homes and not one bank has been held accountable for selling such an INCREDIBLY DEFECTIVE AND TOXIC consumer product.
