MHA Loan Modification and the Missing Roof

It's been a while.

The roof is still missing although I did get a contractor to come out and remove the twisted metal and put down some protective stuff over the plywood. It has been 3 weeks since the storm. The adjuster finally came and now we are in the midst of trying to get the generous check endorsed by both our 1st and 2nd mortgage company. They will then dole out the money in small amounts, send an inspector (to verify that we are indeed repairing our house instead of pocketing the insurance money), overall I think we may have our roof repaired by March or April. I am not joking. Apparently Bank of America's idea of protecting their investment is to leave the house without a roof as long as possible. If I could just cash the check and have $20,000 in cash to flash in front of a contractor I would have the roof fixed by now, but NOOOOOO that's not the way it works. I guess some families would just keep the money and live with no roof? WTF?

In bigger news, while I was on hold with the mortgage company trying to report our insurance claim, in listening to the sales pitches on hold I learned that my family does indeed qualify for the fabulous Making Home Affordable Program. Yea!!

We fully qualify for a loan modification. The process is long and arduous. I have filled out all the paper work, copied tax returns, bank statements and profit and loss statements for the businesses (yet another reason why I have not been blogging), bundled everything up and sent it off certified mail. Now all we ahve to do is wait up to 45 business days, 9 weeks, to find out what Bof A is going to offer us. If they do what they are supposed to do our loan payment plus taxes and insurance will be under $2500/month. That would be such a load off.

Now before some of you hard core Republicans and other banking nuckleheads start reading me the riot act I want to put in my two cents on the whole loan modification thing.

1. We don't have a weird loan. We put down a full 20% when we bought this house in 06. It is a regular loan with a fixed interest rate. We qualified for the loan and had the income to support it when we bought the house.

2. We cannot sell our house. We bought it for $680,000 and currently owe about $580,000. According to Zillow our house is worth somewhere between $450-480,000.

3. Our income has decreased significantly due to the banking industry shutting down all loans and the housing market collapsing. I therefore fully blame the banks for our lack of income. Two of our businesses are related to housing and construction. My architecture business is dead because no one is building at all. Our check cashing business is down 60% because none of the plumbers, drywallers, painters, etc are working or cashing checks.

Due to the above points I fully believe that we should take advantage of the MHA program. I'll keep you all updated on the progress and see if we get screwed around with by Bank of America this is where I will air their dirty laundry.

Till next week.

Flagstaff Blizzard

This has been my week so far. Very Shitty to say the least.

One of the worst nights of my life was Monday December 9th. The blizzard was predicted, so we were somewhat prepared, but it was worse than we thought it would be for us in particular.

School was let out early and all parents were instructed to come and pick up the kids since the busses would not be running. Luckily I had just made a run to Sams Club and picked up all kinds of crap in addition to buying batteries that I had no idea how much we would need later.

We all went to bed as usual, but I was still awake when it all started to go down at 11:00 pm. The power went out since the wind was howling around 30-40 mph. Then the fire/smoke alarms went off and continued to go off for the next 6 hours. Obviously all the children woke up in histerics and Carl pulled on some pants to see what he could do to stop them which turned out to be nothing at all.

The alarms are hard wired. While the power was out we could take out the batteries of the alarms downstairs that we could reach, but the upstairs 16 foot vaulted ceilings we could not get to since the 20' ladder is stored outside under the porch.

We moved all the kids downstairs to sleep on the couch where it was somewhat quieter and I put big hats on all of them to try and protect their eardrums.

I even called our local fire house and they had no idea how to turn off the alarms. Once the power wnet back on all the alarms started going off again since they had power. Carl even ventured out in the now 60 mph winds and blowing snow to turn of the main power and that didn't even work.

Somewhere in the midst of all this we heard a loud creak and were suprised to see that a huge piece of our roof ripped off. I was scared to death to see where the peices had landed since we couldn't see a thing out the windows due to the blizzard.

We woke up the next morning and this is what we saw. State Farm has been anything but helpful in getting it taken care of. We have been told it could be a week before a claims adjuster gets out here. Awesome. They really know how to get shit done. In the meantime I'm trying to find a contractor to come and get the loose pieces off the roof and tyvac the thing before the next storm hits on Friday.

This could be the thing that takes our house from us. I don't have the $4400 deductable to get it fixed. The credit cards are maxed out and I am at a loss as to what to do. I'm trying to be cheerful, but this is not going to be a good Christmas.

Oh and did I mention that we also need to replace our garage door. Carl closed the door again after one of the kids left their snow shovel in the jamb and it bend and shattered all the glass in the door.

This is the best week ever.