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carney09
member
I wish I could shortsell my house
carney09
member
*sigh*
We way overpaid for our current house. We bought in 2005 when it was the height of the housing bubble. We paid $220K for a 1100 sq ft, 2 bed, 1 bath old house.
We've since gutted it and redid the upstairs, the downstairs, put in a new heating system, new hot water heater, new flooring, new appliances, and we're about to put a new roof on the garage and redo the plumbing and bathroom. All told, its been about $50K worth of renovations.
We want out, but we're sooooo upside down on the value. We only owe about $200K now, but houses comparable to ours are selling for like $175K right now.
We have no money laying around to pay the difference. 
I hate this. I wish we could shortsell, but we don't really NEED to leave you know? I'd feel bad if we did that.
This discussion has been closed.
Re: I wish I could shortsell my house
We are in the same boat, paid 220K for our house in 2005 (2 bed 1 bath), have put a ton of money into it and we are so upside down it is sickening.
We are not sure how long it is going to take for the market to turn around. We have thrown around the idea of renting it when we are ready to buy a bigger house.
Ahh, I hear ya! We bought our house in 2003 for $175,000 and we could probably sell it for maybe $165,000 right now. That is more than we owe, but we still feel like we lost our a$$es. We won't be selling for a while...
It sucks because 2 years ago we bought land that we were hoping to be able to build a house on this year... That's not happening. What sucks even more is that our current house has only 2 bedrooms on the main floor, so we will not even be able to think about having another baby until we are out. I know I could have them share a room, but I just don't want to feel that cramped. Our house does have a finsihed basement with two bedrooms, but I'd never put DD so far away from us when she's like 2 or 3 or even 10 for that matter!
Our longer term goal is to get our land completely paid off, and in two or so years sell our current house (fingers crossed that the market turns around)and build finally.
I think you'd have to get a different mortgage if you did that (rent it) because most mortgages don't let you. I would love to do that.
Another issue we have though, is its very hard to get a mortgage now with no down payment. We don't have 20% of $300K handy. LOL. We could easily afford a mortgage for that much house, but don't have the cash to put down.
So I think we'll be stuck in this house for another bazillion years.
How big is your home? Have you had to essentially rebuild it? LOL! Cali housing is INSANE though, no doubt.
Reading all your responses on the cost of your homes with the amount of sq ft is making me happy I live in Texas. Where the houses are big but the cost is low.
Carney, just wait a few more years. The market will get better.
We bought our house at the beginning of all of the housing mess in 2008 and got a pretty good deal for Cali. It's a 2 bedroom and 1bath for $205K.We have put in hardwood floors, central air/heat, replaced the roof on the garage and did landscaping. Our next project is the bathroom.
The shiitty part is the house across the street is a 3bed, 3 bth with a den that sold for 185K 3 months ago. It would be nice to upgrade to a bigger house before the housing goes back up. It's just not at all possible.
Yup - same here. We bought in 2005 for 200k. We put 40k down and owe about 150k now. Unfortunately the house is only worth 130-140 in the current market. Take away selling costs and we really got screwed.
We had to move for my work. I was commuting 2-3 hours each way and it was driving me insane. But instead of selling it, we just rented it out. So in a way it's a good thing. Even though we are upside down of the house, having a rental property is a great tax benefit for us and we are just looking at it as a long term investment at this point.
The rough thing about that was that we didn't get any money out of it to make a down payment on our current house, so we had to really scrimp and save for a while to come up with the down payment for this house. And then, the value of our current house is STILL dropping, so we've probably already lost all the money from the down payment. Sigh.
hmmm. I'm not really sure about this one. We rented our house out and no one ever questioned what kind of mortgage we had on it.
It was really hard to get the second mortgage though for our next house. What we had to do was qualify for the loan amount of BOTH houses combined. Also we had to come up with a 3% down payment, since no one does zero down anymore. Not having any equity out of our last house made this a challenge.
We would sell our house in a heartbeat if we could walk away with at least a down payment for another house. We live on a small cul-de-sac with another 25 houses. The floor plans vary, but ours is a standard 2300 sq ft 2 story house. We have about $200,000 left on our mortgage. (We make 2 extra payments a year), but we have had 4 foreclosures on the block, and 1 sold at auction for $96k.
My grandmother's house is available for us to buy, but there is no way we could rent our house to cover the mortgage and HOA right now. It is sad because my g-ma's house is in a great neighborhood and school district. It would take about 50K to fix it up, but it would be worth it. Especially since she wants to sell it to us for like 100k.