Help Save My House...
https://givesendgo.com/ptsddaddy
UPDATE:
I have taken some time to pray about the situation and calm down a bit. I am taking the time now to better describe the situation at hand. Unfortunately, give/send/go lets me add one picture so I am going to combine this with a blog post with the other photo’s of the foundation for those who need a better idea of what the problem is.
The history that led to the situation:
I was in the Army for 10 years. I was planning on staying for my full 20 years, but life had other plans. The Army medically retired me in 2015. Now with this part of what I was diagnosed with and dealing with was PTSD, hence the nickname PTSDDaddy. PTSD, combined with basically having to change careers unexpectedly led to a domino affect on my ability to make sound financial decisions. I panicked and went for the first job I got offered which meant I had to move my family from a house I owned in North Carolina to Florida and pay rent. We attempted to rent our houses out and with the cost of the move and one of our renters just not really caring and moving out in the middle of the night rather than pay rent, we ended up losing our houses to foreclosure. I tried working with the banks and THOUGHT I was making progress to keep the mortgages going, but I was unsuccessful, and they took the house.
I could not keep up with mortgage and paying rent to keep a roof over my family, and I lost control of all the finances at this point.
I wanted to sell the houses, but the real estate people I was talking to wouldn’t put my houses on the market for an amount that I could pay off the mortgages. In retrospect, I probably should have just sold them and paid off as much of the mortgage as I could, but that lesson has been learned the hard way.
So, I hit a depression and continued making bad financial decisions. I ended up having a vehicle repo’d along the way and at one point I was looking at attempting to file bankruptcy. I was paranoid about declaring bankruptcy because I had a job where I carried a security clearance and feared losing my job because of it. If I couldn’t work AND declared bankruptcy, how was I ever going to come back from that?
Bottom line, I was pretty down and depressed and unable to pay everything.
Fast Forward a bit:
I took a job in Maryland that paid twice as much as my job in Florida. I am by no means making a bad salary. Maryland is a heck of an expensive place to live. With the move and the animals, we have I didn’t have many options on places to move to and took a rental lease where I know I pay too much, but this was the first step I was taking a hit in order to make more and start paying things off and fixing my credit. The problem we have faced here is the bad credit. I have been working for past several years on fixing my credit, hoping to buy a house for my family, not just renting and spending way too much on someone else’s mortgage.
Progress to OUR HOME:
I have made a great deal of progress towards fixing my finances and my credit. I have been making much smarter decisions and it’s showing. The problem now was that my lease here is up in May 2023 and it’s stated in the lease that if we renew it will likely be more money per month. Renewal isn’t an option for me at this point, and I wasn’t sure how we would find a place in Baltimore that will allow our animals to move in.
Then God kicked in:
I had been working for nearly 6 years on getting some of my combat related special pay. Everyone told me I qualified for it but I had trouble filling out the paperwork and the contact I had to help me with this had lost contact with me. I finally just sat down, focus, and fill it out myself the best I could. It worked. Not only did I get my pay, but I got my back-pay as well.
We had a fair chunk of money, not enough to buy a new house, but we could find a fix-r-upper and the house hunt began. My wife has M.S. and the heat during summertime has really affected her physically. We didn’t know this until we moved to Maryland, but it made sense why she was so unhappy in Florida now. I told my wife to pick the location we will move to, and we will look for an opportunity to purchase a house, and take time to fix it along the way.
The House:
We found a house in Maine for $29,000 large enough to keep comfortable, broken enough that it was in our price range. We could pay cash and not carry a mortgage. I sent my wife up to check it out, and she loved it. Unfortunately, my wife and I are not experts, and didn’t understand how bad the foundation of the house is. We have had a couple of estimates, the first one being 20,000 to fix. Not so bad, but that guy disappeared when he couldn’t get anyone to even attempt it at that price. We found another company and he couldn’t get into the house until the snow thawed. We found one more company, and they immediately went to our house to check it out. It’s a husband/wife team who really has gone above and beyond, taking their “date night” to go visit our house, sending us pictures, and talking to everyone required for building permits and such to put together an accurate estimate.
The Bad News:
Turns out this “take time to fix it up” idea that I had has turned into a “race against time” situation. The foundation is crumbling on 3 of the 4 sides of the house. They need to order specially made steel beams to brace the house before they can even attempt to fix the foundation. They also need to jack 3 sides of the house simultaneously to prevent the house from collapsing.
They explained to us that on foundations, if one wall is bad, they can jack up that one wall and fix it or do one wall at a time, but because of the extensive damage, they cannot do that in this case. The major risk is jacking up one wall, the other 2 will completely collapse and the house is gone, possibly hurting them in the process if not death. The other issue is likely the frozen ground is what’s keeping the house up right now and there is a risk of the house collapsing when the ground thaws. So, this is the main part that makes this an “emergency” rather than something I could save up for or finish fixing my credit and get a loan. I don’t have time at this point.
The cost, what we need:
To jack up the house and properly support it so it doesn’t fall, it will cost us $50,000. That is the emergency part.
To fix the foundation is going to cost $40,000, which after properly supported it’s not an emergency, but it can’t sit forever on those supports alone, so it needs to happen fairly soon after they propped the house up.
So, we are attempting to get $90,000 together to get this foundation fixed.
Why am I asking for help:
Ultimately, I wanted to get a loan to fix this house. Nobody will give me a loan, even putting the house/land up as collateral. So, a loan will not happen on time.
I looked into as many grants as I could find, and I make too much money a year to qualify for any grants. So, at this point there isn’t any grant I can apply for that I can find.
I don’t know anyone who has an extra $90,000 on hand so the other option is to ask for it.
My promise to pay it back:
I understand that for a random person to ask for everyone else to pay to fix my house is not really a cause everyone wants to help with. I want to make this point, that because I can’t get a loan, and getting a loan and paying it back would be OPTIMAL solution in this case I want to promise to put back every bit of money we earn back into give/send/go causes and send updates to anyone who wants the updates. I will do this in monthly payments, but I think that knowing your money will go to help not only me, but I will then continue to help others along the way would be a better way to ask for help.
Every penny we earn in this fundraiser to save my house, I will make payments back into give/send/go fundraisers to help others.