Gearhead Jim
Full time employment: Posting here.
For your comments and advice:
I have a sister who just turned 60. At 55 she divorced her French husband because he suddenly picked up multiple expensive mistresses, lost his banking job, and generally fell apart. She came back to the U.S with about $500k in a lump, nothing else.
She bought a 100+ year old house in a far suburb of Atlanta, intending to live there and do a slow fix and flip like they had successfully done in England and France. Unfortunately, she bought at the absolute peak of the housing market, and underestimated the financial difficulty of the fixup without hubby's big salary. She needed a big down payment because of no credit history. Her ex also reneged on his promise to pay for their daughter's college, so she had to fund that. No way to get any money from him now, but daughter got her degree and is teaching in Hanoi.
She finally got a job about 2 yrs ago in a small museum that paid next to nothing, and was going down the drain anyway. She had a long distance romance with a divorced guy in California and eventually he invited her to come live with him. Last summer she put the house up for sale, packed some stuff into her car, and drove to CA. Unfortunately, it turned out that the new guy was not divorced, just separated. With three other girlfriends. That lasted for two weeks.
Realizing that she needs to get a serious job, she drove to Washington DC and has been staying with friends for six months while looking for a job. She wants to be an event planner or interior designer, things she had done when working 25 years ago. She has found absolutely nothing during this time, but I think she has been trying for jobs that either don't exist or she is under-qualified for now.
We knew her money was running low, but last week she advised that she is down to her last thousand dollars. She's on her way back to the house, going to retrieve some personal effects, see how the realtor is doing, try again for a job in that area.
Last week she also asked me to cover her mortgage for three months, hoping the house will sell in the Spring so she can walk away with at least a little money and a credit rating. She did not discuss how she would buy food, medicines, etc during this period with only a thousand dollars.
Obviously, she has done a horrible job of managing her money. Her lack of success in finding a job, tells me she is either not trying hard enough or trying for too nice a job. In order to suppor the mortgage, she'd probably need to earn about $75k.
I refused to help with the mortgage, saying that would be throwing good money after bad. Just hope the house sells before the foreclosure process takes it. She made the April 1 payment, but that's the end. I had her detail her monthly non-mortgage expenses, she came up with about $1,300 which seems reasonable. I told her we would supply that money for three months, but after the first month she would need to get some kind of job for at least 20 hrs per week, and send us copies of the pay stubs. No job = no money from us. Walmart and Burger King should be on her list.
This is a terrible comedown for a woman who was a French barronness, living on a 5 acre country estate in southern France. But neither we nor anyone else can support her in "the style to which she has become accustomed", so she'll need to tough it out.
The one question remaining is, would it make sense for us to cover her mortgage for three months while hoping the house sells? That would be ~$2,200/month, to be repaid if the house gets sold, she would be honest about that. Purchase price was $419k, and she put about $50k into improvements. Initial listing last summer was bizarely high at $555k, soon dropped to $500k, then $450k, has been at $399k for the last few months with an extra $5k commission if it sells by end of May. She owes about $270k but in this terrible market, I suspect that a quick sale would require dropping the price to $300k and then she wouldn't get anything for herself. Hence, my initial refusal to subsidize the mortgage. But maybe I'm wrong...
I have a sister who just turned 60. At 55 she divorced her French husband because he suddenly picked up multiple expensive mistresses, lost his banking job, and generally fell apart. She came back to the U.S with about $500k in a lump, nothing else.
She bought a 100+ year old house in a far suburb of Atlanta, intending to live there and do a slow fix and flip like they had successfully done in England and France. Unfortunately, she bought at the absolute peak of the housing market, and underestimated the financial difficulty of the fixup without hubby's big salary. She needed a big down payment because of no credit history. Her ex also reneged on his promise to pay for their daughter's college, so she had to fund that. No way to get any money from him now, but daughter got her degree and is teaching in Hanoi.
She finally got a job about 2 yrs ago in a small museum that paid next to nothing, and was going down the drain anyway. She had a long distance romance with a divorced guy in California and eventually he invited her to come live with him. Last summer she put the house up for sale, packed some stuff into her car, and drove to CA. Unfortunately, it turned out that the new guy was not divorced, just separated. With three other girlfriends. That lasted for two weeks.
Realizing that she needs to get a serious job, she drove to Washington DC and has been staying with friends for six months while looking for a job. She wants to be an event planner or interior designer, things she had done when working 25 years ago. She has found absolutely nothing during this time, but I think she has been trying for jobs that either don't exist or she is under-qualified for now.
We knew her money was running low, but last week she advised that she is down to her last thousand dollars. She's on her way back to the house, going to retrieve some personal effects, see how the realtor is doing, try again for a job in that area.
Last week she also asked me to cover her mortgage for three months, hoping the house will sell in the Spring so she can walk away with at least a little money and a credit rating. She did not discuss how she would buy food, medicines, etc during this period with only a thousand dollars.
Obviously, she has done a horrible job of managing her money. Her lack of success in finding a job, tells me she is either not trying hard enough or trying for too nice a job. In order to suppor the mortgage, she'd probably need to earn about $75k.
I refused to help with the mortgage, saying that would be throwing good money after bad. Just hope the house sells before the foreclosure process takes it. She made the April 1 payment, but that's the end. I had her detail her monthly non-mortgage expenses, she came up with about $1,300 which seems reasonable. I told her we would supply that money for three months, but after the first month she would need to get some kind of job for at least 20 hrs per week, and send us copies of the pay stubs. No job = no money from us. Walmart and Burger King should be on her list.
This is a terrible comedown for a woman who was a French barronness, living on a 5 acre country estate in southern France. But neither we nor anyone else can support her in "the style to which she has become accustomed", so she'll need to tough it out.
The one question remaining is, would it make sense for us to cover her mortgage for three months while hoping the house sells? That would be ~$2,200/month, to be repaid if the house gets sold, she would be honest about that. Purchase price was $419k, and she put about $50k into improvements. Initial listing last summer was bizarely high at $555k, soon dropped to $500k, then $450k, has been at $399k for the last few months with an extra $5k commission if it sells by end of May. She owes about $270k but in this terrible market, I suspect that a quick sale would require dropping the price to $300k and then she wouldn't get anything for herself. Hence, my initial refusal to subsidize the mortgage. But maybe I'm wrong...
