Time to leave your home, give it up…

One of the downsides of financial advice is when a person comes to you and it is too late to help, recently I had a client who was about to give up their home, they couldn’t even afford to pay me for advice, but in hearing their story I thought I could turn them around and told them if it works they can take care of it some other day.

The first thing they showed me was a letter (click on it for the big version) which basically said ‘you can’t afford your home, time to give it up’. You’ll notice a big white space to the right of it which makes it less legible, that isn’t what happened when we scanned it up, it went to them like that.

So the demand to get out wasn’t even presented in a fully readable format. This couple are in …

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RTE News: 1st March 2012, Allsop Space auction

At the auction last week we were asked if we thought that they were fundamentally a good or bad thing; the inclination (given the protests) may be that it’s selling houses out from under people.

Given that these are properties where the owners (virtually all of them were investment properties) cannot pay for them in the foreseeable future it can’t be forgotten that a speedy sale that reduces the build up of arrears and which sells a property where there are live buyers bidding against each other is probably the fairest way to do it.

Nobody likes the idea of anybody ‘losing’ their property (I can’t say ‘home’ because these were not family homes), but if they must then a fair and transparent solution is the best you can hope for.

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Hand back the keys and walk away.

What we are not saying is that people should try this, this post is merely pointing out that this kind of thing could happen and that a failure of enacting sensible policy soon enough could encourage people to look for solutions such as what we describe here as a means to solving their personal debt issues.

We don’t endorse handing back the keys, we are not suggesting that people do it or consider it, but merely looking at the pro’s and cons of doing so and demonstrating a method whereby a person could potentially try to fool the system while doing so.

The Cons are basically that you lose your home, and assuming that in this case the person is in €100,000 of negative equity then they are also hit with a judgement for the shortfall plus expenses, for the following twelve years that debt can come back to haunt you. Your actual credit may be restored in year seven but that doesn’t mean you are off the hook.

Consider the position of Joe Bloggs, he is deeply in debt, …

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