Day 158: Notice of Trustee Sale

Credit Score: 655

YAAAAAYYYYY!!!! It came!! I was so hopeful that the law firm would be just as fast with this notice as with the last one, but I didn't really believe they would be. On the date that was the minimum time from the Notice of Default, they dated the Notice of Trustee Sale, then got it on my door a couple days later.

I saw it taped to my door when I got home from work on Friday. Saturday, again matching the previous history, we had six letters in the mail with a note that we had an additional six letters to pick up at the post office.

I was excited enough to just see the notice on the door because our odds of selling before the end of the year had just rocketed up, but there was one piece of information later in the notice that made it even better - they had a specific date of sale! Date, time, detailed location of exactly where and when my condo will be sold. The earliest would've been early November based on the notice being posted August 3rd, and no, the sale isn't the earliest possible, but it's still pretty darned good. Early December!

I'm really liking this law firm - their punctuality and thoroughness - so I think it's a safe bet that the sale won't be postponed. I'm feeling really good that it's going to sell in December and that we aren't going to owe taxes.

(One person asked me recently "what if no one buys it?" so thought I should explain that quickly. In all likelihood, no one will buy the condo at the trustee sale. The condo doesn't get listed as "on the market" and I don't have to find a seller. What'll happen in early December is that the county will auction off my condo on my behalf to the highest bidder - most likely the bank will be the highest bidder. They have to go through this process to legally transfer ownership from me to the bank. If someone does want it, they just have to pay an amount that the bank accepts and ownership transfers straight to them. But, 99% chance that the bank will own it at the end of the sale, and 100% chance that I won't.)

Even if it the sale gets delayed though, I'm glad to see articles like the one a commenter linked in my last post saying that some lawmakers are worried about this bill expiring. I would think, as the non-expert I am, that allowing the bill to expire could only be damaging to the economy. I had not considered the possibility of a retroactive reinstatement of the bill though. That really could work, and seems more likely than the off-chance that congress will get anything this big (i.e. useful) approved before the election. But, the article is entirely right that if your foreclosure ends anytime in 2013, you don't owe the tax burden until April 2014. So really, congress has until the end of 2013 to give the homeowners that tax relief. I'm more optimistic that it'll happen when the timeline really stretches out that much further.

Now that we've got a date, a schedule we can plan to, and a newly solidified future, Cory's finally onboard with contemplating a new place. He's been a little resistant, knowing that we might still have a year or more in this place. So we've just now started looking online at apartments and rentals. I asked him to circle areas on a Seattle metropolitan map where he'd be willing to rent. I, the transplant, had been repeatedly finding places I thought looked great but that weren't in places he, the native, wanted to live. I'm starting to wrap my head around a much longer commute too. Plus, we think we're definitely paying movers to do all the hard work. We'll be in a new place by Christmas. : )

I did send a copy of the notice to the lawyer we've been working with, and asked if we HAVE to still have the condo as our "primary residence" on the date of sale. What does that really mean? We sleep there that night? We're not paying for another apartment at the time? We haven't redirected our mail yet? Or can we move a month before the sale and still qualify for the exemption? Does a tax advisor make that decision for us? What's needed?

Buuuut, I haven't heard back yet. I'll post again when I do.

As a last note, my credit score went up another point! So far in this process, I've taken two big wallops to my credit score equaling about 100 points. Since those two wallops, my score has increased twice by one point. That's a really slow rate of improvement, but once my foreclosure goes through, my number of missed payments will stop growing, and hopefully my credit score will rise faster. It'll still take 7 years for the negative information to drop off my report all together, so it won't be fully repaired until then, but it'd be nice to see it back at a good number eventually. There's also still the possibility that there'll be a third wallop after the foreclosure finishes, since that'll be the first time that my report officially gets a "foreclosure" on it, instead of just a bunch of missed payments. Credit Karma's simulator says that adding a foreclosure won't lower my credit score, but who knows how accurate that is. It'll definitely be interesting to watch.