Don't Move A Couch!

If there is no other reason to motivate you to do whatever you can to save your home, then consider this. When you lose the home to foreclosure, you will have to move. Furniture, books, appliances, clothes, pots and pans, and everything else inside your home will have to be moved.

Whether you have a place to go or not, this will not change the fact that you will have to transport large, heavy pieces of furniture down stairs, up stairs, and across town. This should be avoided at all costs.

In fact, you can look at your situation as a fork in the road. One path leads to hard work, and the other also leads to hard work. One path leads to a destination where you have stopped foreclosure, the other path to a new apartment that is much too small for your family. And no matter what path you eventually find yourself at the end of, you will have worked long and hard to get there.

The question you have is whether you would rather do the work now to stop foreclosure, or put off the work and move in a matter of weeks or months.

If you choose to stop foreclosure, you will have to put together a repayment plan with your lender, find a new mortgage company to refinance you, work with a local private investor, or seek government assistance so you can stay in your home. This path will be long, with many roadbumps, and will be intersected by wrong ways and dead ends (also known as foreclosure scams). But at the end of the road, you will be caught up on your mortgage and will not have to worry about your present foreclosure situation ever again.

The second path, though, will allow you to sit back, relax, and do nothing for now. You don't have to lift a finger to stop foreclosure; you just let it go, take advantage of the time the law gives you to stay in the house mortgage-free, and then move a few days before the sheriff evicts you. However, once you realize you need to find somewhere to go after losing the home, the same amount of work will need to be done. You have to find a house or apartment to rent, then rent a truck to load up with your personal items, and transport it all to the new rental.

And all this will take just as much work as the path that leads to keeping your home. Just as an example, your couch will have to be taken apart, cushions removed and stacked up, and all of it will have to be carried downstairs, outside in the rain or snow, lifted into your SUV, and driven to your new apartment. Then, this process happens in reverse: get the couch out of the SUV, carry it through the rain, up the stairs, and into your new apartment, to be put together with the cushions and arranged in any way you want.

As anyone who has carried an enormous couch knows, this can be a long, exhausting exercise in dropped couches and broken watches. The work to move just this couch to your new apartment will have to be multiplied by a factor of several dozen times in terms of time and intensity, depending on how many personal belongings you have.

Is this whole couch-moving example any less work than just saving the home to begin with? Of course not. Moving a couch is a lot of work. Comparatively, moving the couch is more work than what it takes to stop foreclosure. You can stop foreclosure with a few phone calls, to be honest. Add in a few processing forms for whatver lender or investor you're working with, drive to a closing, and get the deal taken care of.

I'd much rather drive to a closing to stop foreclosure, than drive across town with a couch tied to the top of my car. Wouldn't you?