And it all gets real again. Suddenly there’s a queasiness in my stomach. A tightness in my throat. Shit, shit, shit.
National City is saying that we won’t “take” their calls. What? Every single time we call them we give them our phone number and we haven’t received a single voice mail from them. How is it that we’re not taking their calls? What about the messages we’ve left THEM to discuss the possibility of a charge off?! And what the heck is a charge off again?
A charge off is basically them looking at the money we owe them and charging it ‘off’ like a bad credit card debt. They would report our unpaid mortgage as a loss for tax purposes. It would be on our record as a “bad debt” for 7 years and they could (according to them) come after us for the money in court. It feels like we’re f’d. We were hoping to work this all out through the short sale, but they are not interested.
Now my day is about this. And all the things we're doing wrong, all the ways we've messed up, all the money we owe and all the money we've lost. This shouldn’t be happening, right? Why is it? Well, the charge off is happening because we haven’t paid National City in six months. That’s why. And they’re worried they won’t get any money from us. In December we let them know that we were pursuing the short sale. This makes no difference.
National City has given us an ultimatum. We have until Monday at 9PM Eastern to pay them $645.00 to ‘forestall’ the charge off for 30 days... or else. Or else they're charging it off. Okay. So it’s a threat. We don’t have the $645.00 to keep them at bay. It feels like they’re just trying to shake us down to get whatever they can right now. They’re not interested in any money from the short sale and, they threaten that with the charge off we won’t be able to go forward with the short sale. This might actually not be a lie. They do have a lien against the house and it needs to be released in order the buyers to have clear title. Hmmmm.... throat tightens, stomach churns, head spins. We REALLY need to call that attorney.
It’s been 7 months and it doesn’t get easier. We need to confront all of this head-on and I keep thinking it will get easier each time but it doesn’t. I keep wanting life to be normal. But it's not. Well, it is. It's just that our normal is different now than it was before.
So we need to call an attorney, we need to explore the benefits of bankruptcy in regards to our situation, we need to sort this out with National City, we need to call the foreclosure department at Countrywide to make sure they know we have a short sale offer so that they forestall the foreclosure since one department doesn’t know what the other is doing…
And I’m at work. And it’s tax season. And month end. When the heck am I supposed to make all these calls?!
Breathe.
On the way home I call Bob. He calms me down. It’s going to be okay. We’ll figure this all out. He already spoke to our neighbor (who knows all about bankruptcy. He's getting some information together for us) and did some research on charge-offs. He’ll handle the call with National City on Monday and one of us can call Countrywide then.
Just breathe.
We made it to the weekend.
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