Here we go again.

Here I am in North Carolina wondering where in the world we are going.  I spent nearly all of the last 17 months away from home working to make a living with promises that I would have some great opportunities to earn a lot extra with some overseas rotations.  Well none of that materialized and then on my birthday I received a phone call that my temporary services were no longer required by the company I was working for.  They let me go due to the lack of work I had been contracted to do even though I was doing a lot more for them than originally contracted for and even though I had a pending appointment to sign on with them as a direct employee.

This left me with a huge amount of mixed feelings since I loved that I was getting to return home and live with my family again under the same roof, yet it also left me wondering exactly how I was going to keep that roof over my head without an income.  So far I have had the good fortune to accomplish some of the long awaiting routine home upkeep that had been languishing since my work related forced absence from home.

The past two weeks have been interesting to say the least.  My wife who had been job hunting for an extended time finally found steady work, not quite full time but the 34 hours a week will help a lot.  We decided to be a little proactive and inform out mortgage companies about our new found inability to pay our mortgage payments, and ask for a deferment or forbearance, to give us some time to get a sufficient income level back in place to properly service our debt.

It turns out that you can't get ahead of the game and do a loan modification before your credit rating takes a hit.  They make you wait until you are anywhere from one to three months late before they will even talk to you about it.  Of course the fact is that as soon as you are late they are allowed to slap on late fees and I'm sure that they will grow as each month passes and we are still unable to make the payments.  My personal feeling is that they force you into default before acting just to extract more money out of you along the whole process.

In the case of our first mortgage since the loan will go into default they will charge us late fees, and since we do other banking with them I expect that or credit card will also be jacked up to the default interest rate of 23.9% and our previously free checking will also start accruing monthly charges of around 12 bucks a month.  If I understand the way they work, these default fees will remain in place until we show 6 months or more of continuous on time payment of all of our debt with them.  The end result is that we will pay thousands of dollars in total penalties for the fact that I was laid off instead of allowing us to put those thousands of dollars to working paying off the debt by being proactive.

You have to love a system that is set up towards ensuring failure rather than success.