Hard Times Hit Home

Hard Times Hit Home:
A Family's tale of foreclosure

Sunday, October 14, 2007

By Cami Reister

The Grand Rapids Press

GRANDVILLE -- Greg and Tracy Sweeney share a bedroom in their 1,000-square-foot apartment.

Three of their school-age children are in the other, where mattresses are squeezed next to each other on the floor. Their oldest sleeps in a rollaway in the living room.

"You have to wait in line to use the bathroom. Wait in line to get into the kitchen. Wait in line to go into the living room," Tracy said.

(click title to read rest of story...)

From the story I'm going to assume they have 4 children and make approximately $75,000 or $6,250 monthly when the story started in 2001.

They moved to Michigan in 2001 and bought a home with a mortgage payment of $1,336 per month or 21% of his salary. It sounds like his is the only income. So far, good. I'm not good with dimensions and spacial awareness but 2,650 sounds reasonable.

In 2003 they decide to build a new home, the wife says of the builder, "we were mutually trying to help each other out." This in my opinion is where the fall started.

#1 They already had an adequate home
#2 No mention of an increase in salary
#3 Who buys or builds or takes on more debt "to help" some else out"?
#4 They got greedy and/or tried to "keep up with the Jone's" (even if the Jone's were imaginary)

They had expected the new mortgage payment to be $1,600. The wife says, "who wouldn't do it?"

I can answer that. I wouldn't. I can also find probably 5 to 10 other people pretty quickly who wouldn't have done it either. Especially with 4 kids. I wouldn't exactly call it EXTRA but if you have and extra $264 per month to pay for a new house I'm sure I could stay in the original house and find a better way to invest that $3,168.

Of course after putting the cart before the horse, the story get worse. Much worse. Blah, blah, blah.

Lost both houses. Lost his job. He got cancer. The kids had to switch schools. Now all six (?) are crammed into a two bedroom apartment. Their stuff is in storage. The story doesn't say but I can't imagine they have any or much savings left. Looking for jobs.

It's sad but I think that people should learn to live within or below our means because we never know what can happen.

I've been at my job, in three different cities, now maybe a fourth for 12 years but for the last 9 or 10 years it's been with no security that there won't be an announcement that the job has been eliminated.

I try (not very well) to spend or not spend, like this week will be my last paycheck because it could be.