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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Amy J who wrote (28104)	3/13/2005 11:48:40 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

the flip side to the story, is your tenant was awfully conscientious about her responsibilities. She didn't want to borrow money with your assistance because she was concerned she couldn't pay it back, given she was a secretary with a low salary (if I recall your earlier post about her correctly.) You have to understand, buying a house in Baltimore City, especially back then, was a much better prospect than renting. Buying would have been a great deal less expensive for her over that time period. If she had bought the house when she originally wanted to buy it, she wouldn't now be two steps away from being a ward of the state. She had more than enough income to pay the mortgage and cover the maintenance. She has paid a rent that is higher than the mortgage pmt plus maintenance the entire time she has lived there. She has bought the house, only she bought it for us. She was simply too financially naive to understand the inflation risk someone takes renting over a long period when you have an income that is steady or declining. She was also unable to accept that in order to have good credit rating she couldn't pay her bills late every single month. She always pays her rent, but it is always 2 weeks late. You can't do that and get a mortgage. She is late on most of her bills and always has been, even when she had twice the income. She doesn't get that this simple practice gives someone a bad credit rating. I told her all these things and offered to help her through the process but she refused to even try to learn about this stuff even though she expressed a strong desire to own that house over and over. I could only help her so far, she had to be willing to make some effort, take some risk. It is sad because her unwillingness to do these things made the difference between living out her last years independently and living out her last years on public assistance.