Losing your Family Home

Losing Your Family Home. You may be wondering why I am so upset about ARMS(Adjustable Rate Mortgages) I think you will better understand when I tell you this true story of my family.

I was living in Mt. Shasta when Dad began urinating blood. It was 1983 and he was helping me build my A-Frame house at 4000 feet on Mt. Shasta. My father hated Doctors and wouldn't listen to them. He had Prostate Cancer. By not dealing with it medically, he not only got prostate Cancer but Bladder Cancer and Cancer of the kidney. Then his doctor recommended taking his prostate, Bladder and one kidney out all at once so he did. He lived another year only to die of Bone cancer from further matastization of the cancers.

When he died his retirement income was cut off and Mom was left with about 1/3 of their previous income which would have been okay except for one thing. They had taken a loan out against their previously paid off house to add a room and to buy a motorhome for 35,000 dollars in 1982, which then bought a 32 foot Winnebago Brave, which was really wonderful for them and for me whenever my family traveled with them.

There was a problem with this loan. My parents knowing nothing about real estate values in the Yucca Mesa area above Yucca Valley California believed the appraiser when he valued their house on 2 1/2 acres of land then at 100,000 dollars. However, this was a lie because the actual value then was only about 50,000 dollars. They then gave them a 45,000 dollar loan to add a room and to buy a motorhome and then two years later Dad died and Mom found out she couldn't afford the 850 a month mortgage payments. When she went to sell the house she found out she couldn't even break even so she allowed the house to foreclose.

At the time of my father's death I considered moving to Yucca Valley and buying a business nearby and living with my mother so she wouldn't lose the house that Dad and I built from scratch. My wife then said, "If you do that it is the end of our marriage." So the end result since I was then raising 3 teenagers was Mom let the house foreclose and moved to Palm Springs where she rented a reasonable apartment with a pool and I helped her sell her big car and get a new gold Honda Accord so she could afford to drive and visit us in the Bay area.

Living through my father's death only to have it made worse by my father and mother having been taken advantage of by an appraiser who obviously knew better stuck in my craw and I still haven't gotten over it.

Yes. There is another way to look at it. Mom, if she had stayed alone at that house out in the middle of nowhere that my Dad loved wouldn't have lived very long alone there. However, for me, it was the beginning of the end of my marriage and a mother who would not do anything I recommended in her life. Again and again since she was without my father who was her rudder I would recommend the best course of action and without fail she would do the opposite of what I recommended. So I not only lost my father I lost my mother in that she was really no longer completely functional without my Dad there.

Over the next few years my marriage continued to unravel because of my not being able to be there properly for my father and my mother and I became very passive aggressive toward my now ex-wife for encouraging such disloyalty toward my parents. Our marriage finally ended in june 1994. It went from the happiest years of my life during the first 7 years of marriage to the most awful, lonely and miserable years the last 7 years of mariage that ended in 1994.

So, in the end my mother sold the motor home for about 25,000 dollars and that became her financial cushion over then next 10 or 15 years. She lived in Palm Springs, San Marcos, Freedom, all in California and then Ashland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; Hana and Haiku, Hawaii and the Bay Area, all since my father's passing in 1985. She has now had Senile Dementia since April 2001 and was institutionalized in a facility in December 2001 where she still is at 89 years of age.

I think you might now understand how my mother and father being taken advantage of by an appraiser's fraudulent appraisal would make me very angry about thousands of Americans being given fraudulent ARMS(Adjustable Rate Mortgages) and watching at this point hundreds of thousands of lives across America(maybe millions) being flushed down this economic toilet.