WAKE UP AMERICANS – A LOT OF PEOPLE NEED HELP!

A widow woman worked her whole life out of the home.  Around age 60 she started experiencing heart problems and spent some time in the hospital. It was a pretty scary situation, and she decided maybe she needed to find a way to retire early.

She researched all the information on doing a Reverse Mortgage on her home, which she had been paying on for many years. Everything looked like it would work out for her, so she retired and put her plans in motion.

Something happened that messed everything up.  At the time she retired, which was only recently, she wasn’t supposed to have to worry about paying the Property Taxes on her home during the Reverse Mortgage process.  Then when it was too late to change her mind, she found out that she was going to have to pay her Property Taxes after all – over a thousand dollars.

If you have sufficient money, a thousand dollars doesn’t sound like so much, but if you don’t, it is a lot of money. When you don’t even have enough funds to save a portion of your tax money monthly, you don’t have any idea where you are going to get that kind of money to pay the tax bill.

Needless to say, she had to extract money from the small retirement fund she had earned from her final position. Her other bills got behind, and she took money from her retirement fund to satisfy her creditors. It finally got to be too much, and she realized that she needed to go bankrupt in order to eliminate the creditors, so she could just survive.

She was nervous facing the Bankruptcy Trustee in court, and she was unable to say that she had used her retirement fund in order to pay her bills. When asked, she couldn’t even think of the exact details. She didn’t know what to say in her own defense.

She had used the tax value to report the value of her home. Apparently, you are allowed $40,000 equity in your home in a Bankruptcy in order to be able to retain ownership of your home.  (Note:  I may not be stating this exactly right, so don’t take this statement as fact.) 

The Bankruptcy Trustee thought that with the improved housing market, she might be undervaluing her home, so he ordered that an Appraisal be done. I would guess that she is probably having to pay for the Appraisal herself, which will cost her at least another hundred and fifty dollars. Also, she has to wait for them to do the Appraisal.  The Bankruptcy can’t be finalized until this delay has been completed.

In the meantime she has been suffering more health problems, so at least she has a distraction from having to just sit and worry whether or not she will lose her home after all the years that she worked to acquire it.

When we work our entire lives in America, we expect to be able to retire and not end up homeless.  In our poor economy sadly people are being laid off and ending up homeless. Our Senior Citizens nowadays don’t seem to be receiving the respect that they deserve. But if they start ending up homeless also, this country is really going to be in trouble.

I am certainly hoping that our improved Housing Market is not now going to hurt Americans rather than help them. Where does it end?

It seems that there are a lot of people in America who are either rich or well off enough not to have financial concerns.  I fear that these Americans do not realize how bad so many other Americans have it. They do not realize the extent of the financial problems that many other Americans are facing.

It seems like these unconcerned Americans have no idea how bad the problem in our country really is now. I know that there are Americans out there who are eating dog and cat food, because they can’t afford food. When that man makes that comment on the commercial, “on an every night Top Ramen diet”, he’s not far from the truth.

Somehow, we need to get some of that money pushed down to the bottom level of American people. It is not to “share the wealth”, but it could “share the survival”. 

WAKE UP AMERICANS – A LOT OF PEOPLE NEED HELP!