Day 290: Done! Done! Done!

Credit Score: 652

It’s officially “this time next week” and we’re done! We moved in to an apartment yesterday and the cat seems happy about having new windows to look out. We had a very eventful week though.

Tuesday evening when I got home, three notes were taped to my door. THIS PROPERTY IS NOW OWNED BY FANNIE MAE – one in English, one in Spanish – and a third note with the contact information of a real estate agent representing Fannie Mae. That means we’re officially done, our foreclosure ended in 2012, and we won’t owe taxes! The legal paperwork actually offered us two options. 1, you could stay in your home and work out a rental agreement with the real estate agent and new management company; or 2, you could move out. If you move out and leave the place clean and undamaged, Fannie Mae would pay some “relocation assistance.” That sounded very intriguing so I contacted the real estate agent and found out that I could get $3000! Woohoo! That'll be a nice addition to our down payment savings.

A guy met us in the condo on Friday so we could sign the agreement. It required all the appliances stay, the place to be in “broom-swept condition,” to have no debts or obligations left over, and we would release Fannie Mae of all liability or future law suits we might file against them. All of that sounded great to me except that I wasn’t sure the December HOA dues I hadn’t yet paid would fulfill the obligation about “no debts.” Since $3000 is a lot more than the $300 HOA dues, I decided to just pay the HOA, whether or not I was legally obligated to. We’ll meet the guy again later this week at the condo so he can verify that we’ve emptied the place, cleaned it, and vacated. Then we’ll hand over the keys and he’ll hand us a fat check. :) Both of those will be great Christmas presents.

My credit report doesn’t yet show the foreclosure, but it should only be a matter of days. The bank has generally been reporting me between the 14^th and 19^th of each month. I’m interested to see if my score plunges again, or just stays level. I imagine after the foreclosure shows up on my report, my score won’t keep dropping anymore – just a slow, steady climb back up. And in 2019, it’ll be wiped off my report and all will be forgotten. 

I’m planning one more post, to let you know the final outcome of my credit score in a couple weeks. But after that, that’s all I had planned to cover in the blog. Perhaps I’ll record more next year when we’re looking at houses and loans since there’s so much to learn about the new way of doing things. We’ll see. Either way, thank you all for joining me on my very dramatic 2012.  Good luck with your own housing situations; let me know if I can help at all but I’m hardly an expert. I learned everything from Google and a lawyer, and now have one point of data on how these things work. :) 

Happy holidays. Happy new year. And good luck to all of us with the fiscal cliff!