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In the past 6 years I have had a house foreclosed upon and was laid off. I've seen my daughter, 20, struggle to find a job at minimum wage places that just aren't hiring.
In this experience, I discovered that:
* There is government assistance programs for people losing their homes, but they are geared towards helping the banks, not the people. Banks often will not work towards short sales or loan modifications because, depending on how much you owe vs. how much your house is now valued at, they stand to make more money from the government to let it go into foreclosure.
* I had a FHA Housing counselor tell me that I didn't qualify for assistance because I wasn't behind enough in my payments. Come back in 6 months. And don't pay your mortgage during that time frame. Really? You're telling me not to pay what I can and get further behind in the hopes I qualify then?
* I had an attorney tell me to just walk away, I would be more likely to qualify for bankruptcy. In principle I had issues with this as the only thing I really owed to anyone was the house and while I could make payments, I needed the loan modified to fit my budget. He told me probably wasn't going to happen and that this would be the best solution for me. I had a moral issue on defaulting on a commitment I had made, I just needed the terms of that commitment modified.
* When I was laid off, I had to pay for health insurance through Cobra. The cost was equivalent to half my unemployment checks. I soon was without health insurance.
Long story short....the Government system doesn't work unless you are already rich and really don't need the system to begin with.
The company for which I work now, recently gave the CEO a whopping 37% increase even though the company has not seen "profitable" days since 2000. We've had a rash of lay offs with more projected in the future. How did they derive on the new pay for our CEO? On performance? No. They bench marked other CEO's in other companies to see what their CEO's were making to set our CEO's wage. A common practice. The rich get richer when you're at the top. The rest of us? Lose our jobs in "reductions" due to the poor economy, of which the rich helped create.
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