We all struggle with some dark corners, areas of our lives where we feel that we “should” do better, where we are just not making the grade. The problem is often our own judgment of how we are doing. We tend to be our own harshest critics.

Often if we are willing to forgive ourselves for avoiding the situation or conversation we need to have, the rest starts to fall in place rather easily. Big things can often be broken up into smaller pieces. I know this sounds like self-help time management 101, but we rarely apply it.

There is a way out, following one breadcrumb at a time. And often we begin to see how much the other people in our lives are there for us, and how much their support means.

It is amazing how a possibility of a positive outcome can summon up more energy than a negative one does for me. For a moment yesterday, I was in a space to believe that my two homes with short sale contracts were going to sell, and it totally reversed my feelings about impending bankruptcy, and therefore about my future. What contributed to this was my Broker saying she wanted to pay for an appraisal on the home we had just received a good contract on.

We proceeded with that, retained an FHA approved appraiser, and did not offer any info to him as to what the contract intended. He did the appraisal immediately, and when we received it we found it was identical to the offer we had received. The BPO, done by a Broker the bank paid last week, was over $30,000 more than the appraisal! Of course, based on the BPO, the bank would have (and may still reject) the offer on the table. But in terms of my feeling much more empowered to defend my position that I was doing everything I could to obtain a fair market offer, it definitely went much further. If in fact, the bank rejects this offer, and allows the property to drift into foreclosure, I will be able to have a record of the possibilities the bank had to avoid losing so much time and money. Also the neighborhood would have been able to recover much faster, had the bank permitted this sale, or a Deed-in-Lieu.

This mere validation of what I know to be the truth of the market here, has allowed me to go forward with a more positive feeling that the banks are working against their own interests, as well as those of the country, and certainly against the local market and buyers, sellers and Realtors, when they refuse to put a realistic price on these properties at the outset, instead of wasting everyone’s valuable time and money in a three month procrastination which results in loss all the way around.  It did, however, give my Broker and I the assurance that in the world of short sales, this investment may be well worth it if the seller will take it seriously. If not, we will know soon. Either way, I feel better!

I remember in December getting a call from a woman who was in the pre-foreclosure frustration process, and she was trying to find a place to rent (hopefully to later own) where she could bring her two dogs and three cats. Her husband had lost his job, they were behind on their payments on their home, and now they had to find a place to move to….most had rules about animals and she was really getting worried. What the place looked like and even where it was located meant far less than if she could keep her family together.

The shelters are seeing most of the evidence of this problem. What do you do when relatives have offered to take you in but their children are allergic to your animals? You are grateful and heartbroken at the same time. Some people have larger animals whose care and feeding has now become too expensive, or the caretaker has had to go back to work. Although I did find feeding the dog a lot less challenging to my confused mind than feeding myself. Open the bag, pour it in the bowl. There were times I wondered….could it possibly be palatable for humans?….It would make life so much easier right now! Often I would get home from the store with a bunch of ingredients that didn’t even make a meal, and I found I really craved comfort food….homemade mac and cheese, pot roast….things I couldn’t possibly have time to make. I had to worry every day about trying to happen upon a buyer who was looking for a home in the near future, or I wouldn’t be able to pay for anything shortly. This was a time I wished I had a job where I could just show up, do the work and get paid. Being creative and upbeat about new business was a stretch right now!

Anyway, the animal dilemma is another one that is gut-wrenching for many families, and involves looking for another home for the beloved pet at a time when the kids are going through so much upheaval that snuggling with Fido would really be a blessing. Some of us are fortunate to be able to keep them, but for those who cannot, I have incredible empathy for you right now, and I also hope that those who can, reach out to their shelters for these loved and achingly surrendered pets.

There comes a point where you just know it is time to move out of your home. The first three months they pretty much treat you as delinquent. In fact, even though I knew I would be moving out into one of my rental properties so I could homestead it and possibly afford it, they told me I had to be behind three months in payments and have it listed for sale three months before they would talk to me about a Deed-in Lieu. So I moved after two months, leaving the house empty.

My son flew in to help my other son move me in a weekend and with the help of a U Haul we got most of me out. The residue that didn’t fit took me several months to move out and some i just left. My intentions were good, but it was so hard to go back and actually debilitating after awhile. Cleaning a house you are abandoning feels very different than fixing up a house you are selling. Either way it goes, in my case, was going to be a big loss. The house I was moving into was a wreck, and I was worried everyday about earning enough money to pay my bills with real estate. I had to pretty much block out what was happening as I went about showing excited first time buyers potential homes.

That was a lot like going to a friend’s wedding when you are separated yourself. You feel somewhat conflicted with your value system. You still believe in marriage, yours just isn’t in the best of shape. I also found it really difficult to have my home on the market during the time I was there. I didn’t feel as good about showing it as I had previous homes, and it was a bit chaotic as I tried to pack.It was time to leave.

When the time comes to move, you have to start choosing what you can take with you. Often our first move is to a family member’s, a smaller house or apartment, and there may not be room for everything you have in your home now. Is there already a washer and dryer? Can you take the piano your son has been learning to play? What to do with all the extra furniture you spent years accumulating? Worse than that are things you bought that perhaps are still on your credit cards? I don’t even know what happens with Rooms 2 Go or furniture paid on time….do they come and get it?

You have no money for storage spaces, you are wishing you had joined the neighborhood garage sale a month before, but you were still hoping you could stay at that point.More things get tossed in huge garbage bags to be sorted later. Its the most disorganized packing you have ever done.Perhaps because you are losing your mind in the process? How can you stay organized when life is upside down and topsy turvy at the same time? Multiply this times the number of family members looking to you for calming answers….I only had a dog but was constantly aware of how much more painful and difficult this would have been had my sons still been under my roof!

And people wonder “why did they leave all this stuff in the closet?” It’s kind of like what would you bring if your house caught fire and you only had minutes to grab the important stuff. If we look around and the people that matter and the animals are with us it’s a success….we just pray we will never remember or need all the things that didn’t make it.

I have to admit, being in  Short Sale Hell and the whole ‘losing my home’ process has sent me through the roller coaster stages that I am sure everyone in it has been going through. I started a real estate blog last year at the prompting of my oldest son, and he had me practicing offline. I enjoyed it, and contributed weekly or so, but somewhere around November, as I hit the wall with dealing with the lender and moving and trying to arrange a speedy Deed-in-lieu (which of course never happened), my life got complicated and emotional and I could barely focus on staying in my job….which is real estate on commission.

With houses stuck in short sale limbo, I was hit from both sides. My own house of cards was falling, as first I lost my home, then one at a time my three rental properties as renters moved and the rent no longer was there to cover the mortgage. These rental properties were purchased during the three previous boom years and I had counted on them being my retirement and 401K plan. Shattered dreams are part of this whole mess for everyone and I got lost for awhile, wishing there were a support group for people going through this.As a full time Realtor, I also had no income for four months, as everyone waited for the market to hit bottom and the new administration to fix things.

Last night I happened to go look at my blog, and noticed someone had commented on an entry from November about this nightmare I was just beginning to live. She said only “Thank you for writing this”. I went to bed and couldn’t get that out of my mind. How she found me under joanreynolds.com I will never know, even my family doesn’t know I have been practicing blogging there. The fact that she did find it got me thinking. Instead of writing in my diary every night about my journey, why not enter some of those journal snippets into the blog, get a couple more .com names and see who else is out there who needs a fellow traveler on this road. I am hoping to hear from lots of you about how you are feeling as you transition thru this life change. I will try to keep in touch more frequently, but if you see a bunch with the same dates, they weren’t all just written. I do occassionally remember things from a few months ago as they get cemented in my heart when a second or third  home I have worked very hard on gets added to the mix.

We can educate, encourage, support and lead each other through. I thought divorce had prepared me for most everything, but this is a new and different place than most of us have ever been, and we will find our way together. Stay tuned, and tell a friend if you know one who is also experiencing this; not feeling alone and knowing where to find other survivors is a really good thing.

I think it was the day I had to write my fourth “Hardship Letter” for the bank that I really lost it. That hardship letter was addressed to everyone from the President and Barney Frank to my Congressmen and the President of the bank I was dealing with. I should see if there is a way to attach it somewhere here for your reading pleasure! My former Realtor (she and I parted ways after this) sent it back wanting just the facts. The facts? No emotion? Is there a form letter for this? If she had exhibited either humor or compassion she would still have the listing, but sometimes we just need to vent a little. Getting three letters a day from lawyers, banks, everyone wanting a piece of me, sometimes I just have to let it out. It actually was quite funny….I should have sent it.

Somehow being asked not once, but four times, to document my pain and agony, to prove that I am still in a horrible place, was the final straw for me. The bank had a contract for my home for two months that they had yet to look at, and they were still asking for things that had been sent to them many times. The idea that this was just something for someone to take a peek at once a week made me furious with all of them. They are going balistic over one “possible” case of swine flu and closing schools in anticipation of a crisis….but here are thousands of us in desperate straights waiting for attention and that never gets to the press or anyone who seems interested in solving the problem we are facing. The lack of decision-making people at the bottom has compounded an already terrible backlog of homes in Short Sale Hell!

Realtors hate to even show these homes as 80% of them will never get a response to a contract and eventually float into foreclosure. You can hardly blame us. If we have a buyer who needs a home in a month or two, there is no way a short sale will fit the bill. The price listed is pretty much grabbed out of the air as one they hope will be close to what the bank will accept, but often it is just that they need to get a contract before the bank will do a kind of appraisal to give them a real price. That price may be way higher than the one on the contract, or that buyer may have already walked after waiting so long.  Most buyers have a lease running out or school starting or some reason that time is important.

I keep thinking that if the banks would just take .75 on the dollar on any of these homes they will get far more than they do after it has spent a year in the foreclosure process, appliances and A/C not working, maintenance not being done, lawyers fees adding up. It makes no sense at all that they are procrastinating to the degree they are while we all head toward not only foreclosure but probable bankruptcy as well. But no one is asking me how to solve the problem, or any Realtors for that matter. Gee, we might just have a solution! Everyone in a real estate transaction is paid on commission, only when it closes. If the banks would put the employees in charge of short sales on commission only I bet we would see the inventory flying!

The great benefit I found, was that my neighbor across the street, the one who had just completely redone her home complete with new roof and new kitchen with granite counter tops,  called me later to say she and her husband were in the same boat (pre-foreclosure, trying to do a short sale) and she had been terrified to tell anyone. My honesty freed her to be truthful, and an enormous weight lifted off her shoulders and was really visible on her face when I saw her. It is really critical to know you are not alone on this journey, and  it began a wonderful friendship, borne out of hardship, that will weather not only this crisis but perhaps  a lifetime.

Every Sunday night they would call and tell me to come over for potluck, and we would have a glass of wine and a great casserole or stew, and laugh at the humiliation each of us had to deal with that week. It was graveyard humor, to be sure, but an outlet that we all needed so badly.It wouldn’t have been funny to anyone but us, and came from that “better to laugh than cry” place.  We would get hysterical with our tales of “going down the crapper together” as my friend would call it. But we smiled and were happy for an hour or so, and it gave us a way to start the week with a renewed spirit.

Turns out, we all had a strong faith in God, and that helped us find meaning and value even in the painful things that were happening. We knew that it would all be used to our benefit in the future, even though that was hard to imagine at the moment. The best part was we both always had a safe place to fall apart if we needed one, and I have always found that if I had one, I wouldn’t need it as much. There may not be a 12-Step support group for this yet, but one supportive person is all you need and a true blessing if you find them. Hopefully, if you don’t have one, you will have found one here.

Should I be truthful with the neighbors? Or pretend as long as possible, then disappear in the dark of night? It had certainly happened before in our cul-de-sac. At some point you realize the lights are no longer coming on and the grass is getting tall. You may have only shared an occasional hello or a wave from your cars, but you were neighbors. Where did they go all of a sudden, and why didn’t they say good-bye?

Now you know why. It is the same dilemma you are facing now. I decided to be honest. After all, everyone knew me as pretty open and forthright, to go into hiding would have been terribly out of character. However, telling someone you are losing your home ranks right up there with telling them you have cancer or have lost a family member. It is a place they really don’t want to go, and are never sure what to say. There isn’t anything they can do (they think all you must need  is money), and it isn’t clear if they should offer to bring dinner over. This isn’t like when you bring home a newborn. There is no protocol for this! Where is Ann Landers when you need her?

We don’t even know what we need,  just not to burst into tears until we are safely behind our front door again. They go home, you assume, to talk about it behind their closed doors, and you can only surmise what they might be saying. It is the end of life as you knew it, being a ‘normal’ neighbor. Any  tendency to ever whisper about another neighbor will be forever  curbed.  None of us will ever judge another quite so harshly as we might have before.

I am increasingly amazed at the insight that losing a house is providing to me as well as to my customers facing foreclosure. The idea that things are out of your control is one of the most important insights, because you cease to be able to count on your plan to bring you to the place you want to be. Even that place is obscured by having to live in a daily dependence on outcomes that you cannot predict. It comes down to truly experiencing the faith that you may have proclaimed, and yet never actually walked in. At the root of your circumstances,  there are also many clues to the things you would change in the future.

I am presently walking with several people on this journey thru the mortgage disaster, all there for different reasons, but facing the same uncertainties. I am amazed and delighted at the positive outlook that each family is embracing, albeit in their own time and in their own way. It is as if a huge burden has been lifted and the real solutions are begining to emerge, as the responsibility for the problems are accepted. There is a massive coming out of denial that seems to be going on around and within.

This crisis could be a huge 12-step program for the addiction to materialism that has gripped this culture and time. The re-alligning of values with the way in which we spend and prioritize our spending will be an excellent outcome of the crisis we now face, and perhaps, in the end, will actually save us from ourselves.

In the midst of facing foreclosure, it is not unusual to seek out the advise and counsel of a bankruptcy attorney, and so I did this week. I have to say it was a most comforting experience; a safe place in which to review the financial picture of my life at this moment and,  armed with more options, a place to make choices about my future .

However, being the person I am, I came away with insights that may never occur to most people in this position. The biggest one for me was my reaction to his asking about jewelry. I said, very honestly, I have none. Now, mind you, I hadn’t removed any diamonds from my fingers, neck or earlobes, in an attempt to look impoverished. I honestly don’t have any. Anything I ever have had somehow got lost during my ownership of it. I just never cared enough, I guess. When other women would remark, “Did you see that rock on her hand?” in obvious awe and envy, I usually had missed it. It just never mattered to me.

So my answer was a relief to the attorney, but my reaction over the next few hours was somewhat of a surprise to me. One of the first things I did when I got home was to make a call to a long lost friend. I realized that my jewelry box contained letters, cards and memories, but no actual gold or diamonds. It held reminders of the real gems in my life, my relationships. To hear a voice respond happily to mine, after seventeen years in between, as though we had spoken  yesterday…..now that’s something to treasure. The value of a person who has touched your heart, and whose heart you have touched, contains every bit of the alchemy that turns a rock into a gem that perhaps only those involved will ever know about.

I have often thought of myself as a diamond in the rough, a potentially wonderful woman, waiting for someone to discover her and polish her up. I am quite confident now that I was always a diamond, it just depended on the eye of the beholder, and whether they could recognize one when they saw one. I am so grateful for the eyes that found me, and for their owner’s ability to communicate what they saw back to me, in words that I could hold onto. My reflection was more beautiful than I had ever imagined. And in the manner of the old saying, “it takes one to know one”,  I guess it had a lot to do with the fact that I had also briefly glimpsed their magnificence, and honestly reflected it back to them. It appears that I have the eyes of an alchemist as well.