From “S”:
What do you do when you go to visit some close friends or extended family (people you really care about) and for convenience, meet in a restaurant. They announce they are packing and moving. You Zillow/Trulia them, and sure enough, the house just foreclosed.
It’s the family house they’ve owned for many, many years, and they took a very reasonable amount of equity out. The foreclosure amount being for the amount of the loan…they lost everything.
What do you do?
a. Tell them you know about the foreclosure
b. Pick up 100% of the evening tab which is in a fair priced restaurant
c. Offer some help. What kind?
d. Simply respect their loss and say nothing, avoiding to be too cheery
e. Act as if nothing happened
f. ??
Sounds like a bit of a tricky little situation. At last check we didn’t know to Zillow or Trulia was a verb like to “Google” something, but we’re sure those companies would be flattered.
As for what to do…at the very least you gotta pick up the tab even if it’s Aqua or Gary Danko!
sounds like they should not have taken out a lot of equity.
How much is a reasonable amount of equity? They took it out. How did they lose it? They spent it elsewhere, and are losing the house? I don’t mean to be insensitive. It’s just tough to theorize here without details. Was it in SF? What was it? Where? Family houses of many many years with only “reasonable” amounts taken out perhaps have even more equity than most would consider reasonable.
I don’t follow…. If they are in a reasonable loan and they took out a reasonable amount of equity, then — by definition — there would not have been a foreclosure. Unless there’s a job loss or medical bills that didn’t make it into the story?
Who submits questions like this to tFS, really? I guess the same type of people that covertly google/trulia their friends and don’t have a strong enough relationship to be in the know about their friends mis-fortunes. Buy them dinner for crying out loud and mind your own business. IMO.
http://www.yurts.com/
send em the link. back to the stone age we go.
How much is the note?
Pick up the tab? Quite the opposite. I’d just have them put the whole tab on their credit card, and watch them not pay that debt off either.
The one thing I wouldn’t do is to feel SORRY for them! You might try feeling sorry for the little old lady whose pension went to fund their lifestyle and who, unlike your friends, will now have to suffer the consequences. But your friends? Unless there was some good reason for them not paying back the money they took from someone else and promised to pay, I don’t think I’d feel very sorry for them.
That scenario wouldn’t seem to apply. This was supposedly a longtime family house. We presume it had a lot of equity to be borrowed against. So, they took out that equity. We presume they can’t afford the mortgage so it’s going to foreclosure. Your hypothetical old lady would likely get her money back when the foreclosure sale transpires.
The old lady will get pennies on the $ when the foreclosure sale transpires.
You cannot say that definitively. In SF things sell for more on the open market than how banks value them, routinely. In fact, none of us know what the heck went down here (if anything).