Eilene Zimmerman's Blog

BLOG: Grateful For My House And, Yes, Even My Mortgage

Taking My Own Advice (10/2/10)

I’m about to pay my mortgage, a mortgage in my own name, for the first time. It feels pretty good. You just click the “pay now” button on the Citimortgage site, which you have previous enabled with your checking account number, and vuela! you have paid your mortgage on time. Bingo. Very exciting.

Unlike my ex-husband’s grave fears—which he set down in writing in our divorce agreement--I did not forget to make a payment. I did not ruin my credit. (He had worried about his credit, not mine, since the previous loan wasn’t in my name but his, something I didn’t realize until I tried to pay it).

I have since refinanced, with the help of the nicest mortgage guy in the world, who—in July and August—patiently took me through the steps needed to get my ex husband off the loan and the loan in my name, at a slightly lower interest rate. It seemed like there were about a million little conditions at the end of that process preventing it from happening, but finally, it did. Many of those little conditions involved my lack of credit history—another problem with not paying the bills.

Of course, I’m lucky I could refinance at all. I know quite a few people struggling under upside-down mortgages—houses bought when the market was crazed and inflated and now those houses are worth less than what’s left to pay on the mortgage. No refinancing there, unfortunately. Just short sales and foreclosures. Some of these people sincerely want to restructure their loans so they can pay, but the banks advise them to just stop and wait for something to happen.

In August lenders repossessed more than 95,000 homes—up fro 76,000 a year ago and a new record for the month. And that number should probably be higher,the folks at RealtyTrac told CNN recently, given the number of borrowers who have missed one or two payments. In California, actually,the news is better than it is nationally—last month home prices were climbing nearly everywhere in the state, but especially in coastal cities like San Diego—the median house price here was up 11.2 percent, to $389,000.

All this to say that I don’t take for granted the fact that I have a house, or a mortgage I can handle—at least this month.

Posted by Eilene Zimmerman on Sat, Oct 2nd, 2010
Last updated Mon, Oct 4th, 2010

Keywords

mortgage foreclosure credit San Diego CNN RealyTrac

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