I have always been proud of having kept all my ducks in a row all these years, at least outwardly. I am not the kind of person who would air their laundry in public. At work, I am more the person who would listen to other people complain about their lives or vent about their problems at home. What I share, I share my problems only to the extent that makes everyone believe that I am just like them.

I have always avoided imposing on people: I do not like asking for favors, I do not like asking for help. I do not know if this means I have an inflated sense of my capabilities. I have always interpreted this as being independent, being self-sufficient. Friends and family have told me on many occasions that people are willing to help others as much as I do. But for some reason, my big ego refused to accept this. I feel good helping others, I feel strange asking for help, even if help means something as simple as listening to me vent about something.

Slowly I am coming to realize that my sense of “independence” comes from my fear of being judged. If people know my issues, they will judge me. Or so I thought. Does this mean I am quick to form opinions of others when they tell me their problems? I would like to think not, but it is making me look at it more closely now.

But another part of me believes that people will think what they want to think. The part that says, “What does it matter?” The part that believes that people will think what they want to think. It doesn’t really matter whether I keep my situation a secret or if I tell them the whole scoop. They will still form their own conclusions.

So, what to do? I keep quiet. I tell people whenever the right moment comes. And I don’t really know what the right moment is with every person. It just happens.

The mailbox.  We have started receiving letters from our mortgage lenders.  The one I opened said that our loan was now officially in default, meaning we have not done anything to make our payments current and has now been forwarded to collections.  We haven’t called, we haven’t replied to a single one of their letters.  Even though I know what to expect at every step of this foreclosure, the letter still hit me like a wet rag.  Before this one, we received letters with gentle reminders that we might have forgotten to pay the bill, and that they understood that sometimes things happen, so “please send your check payment as soon as possible; we are waiving any fees at this time. Thank you.”

I’m sure that had we not disconnected our telephone service, they would be leaving us messages there, too.  Fortunately for us, there is no more inbox for them to leave their collection messages.

Right now all we are waiting for is to take out whatever few things remain at the old house: a treadmill, a weight bench, some garden tools, an eight-foot roll-up sun shade, and a few potted plants.  After these are out of the house, we are contacting the lenders and sending them back the keys.  Sometimes I wonder if they actually have the deed to the house.

My heart still skips a beat whenever I come home and take the mail from the mailbox in the new house, even though I know that none of the collection letters will be coming here.  I hope…

We have recently decided to move out of our 3-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath house on a hill and move back to our smaller two-bedroom/one-bath bungalow closer to town.  We bought the bigger house a little more than five years ago, a decision that, looking back now, shouldn’t have been made back then.

The day we looked at the big house, our mortgage broker said that it is just beyond what we could afford.  The next day, he called and said he found us lenders that would take us.  CitiMortgage and GMAC.  Because we liked the house so much, it didn’t even occur to us that we should have been the ones making the decision on whether we could afford it or not.  We missed this red flag.

We all have dreams: a nice house with lots of windows and a view, a nice car that’s shiny and doesn’t break down, children that live up to our dreams, and dogs that know where and when to poop.  Some people will do whatever it takes to achieve these dreams, whether it is the right time or not.  Some work hard to get their dreams and oftentimes never get there.  Some get sucked into their dreams with (unwarranted?) confidence and false promises.  I think we belong to the third group.

I will call my spouse S.  Both S and I are professionals in the healthcare industry, so I can justifiably say that we both have fairly secure jobs.  Being in a childless household, we earn more than enough for a more than decent life.  We traveled quite a lot, took our dog to the groomer.  We had a lot of disposable income.  We lived in a nice two-bedroom starter home in a fairly nice neighborhood – a university town.

And then came the big house.  At this point, I will not try to figure out how we got steered into the path of wanting more square footage.  Maybe it was because we had plenty of house guests who came every year.  Maybe we needed to use the bathroom at the same time more frequently than we preferred.  Maybe we wanted to park both cars in a real garage.  Or maybe we felt that we deserved something better.

“After all,” we told each other, “this (the small house) is supposed to be a starter home.  We need to get a real house.”

It was fun to house-hunt.  We, like a lot of people, watched a lot of HGTV and got into this mode of looking for the perfect home.  We looked at houses in our preferred neighborhoods in the trendy parts of the city, near the ocean, and near downtown.  The prices were ridiculous.  Houses the same size as our little bungalow, or even smaller, were on the market for a hundred thousand dollars more.  This is another red flag that we missed: prices were going precipitously high.  I remember saying, “You couldn’t make me pay these prices for the house we already own!”

One day, I found an open house in the paper.  “That’s the same house I found on the internet this morning, and I emailed the link to you,” S told me later that day.

When we drove up to the house, I said, “No, we can’t afford this.”  S agreed.  We turned the car around and started out the long driveway, when we looked at each other and said, “Well, it won’t hurt to look.  We drove all the way out here, we might as well go and see.”

And we did.  And we loved it.  And that was all it took.  As I mentioned before, we let other people make our purchase decision for us.

And we made an offer.  And out of four offers that day, the sellers picked us.  We put our first house out on the renters market.

One month later, our first renter moved into our starter home and we moved in to our “dream home.”