Just because the homeowners are not current in their mortgages does not automatically mean that the house is forfeit, even though the debt may still exist.

Banks aren’t foreclosing in states that require Judicial foreclosure. You may be able to use bankruptcy to stop foreclosures in states that don’t require court approval of foreclosure.

Fox News’ Glenn Beck, assuming the role of 21st Century Marie Antoinette, leads a pack of royalist Republicans who have spent the summer mocking, vilifying and denigrating the nation’s 14.5 million unemployed workers. It is the moneyed class smacking down the working class in an attempt to disempower and disenfranchise them. But the unemployed are mad as hell and aren’t taking it any more. The Union of the Unemployed and Working America are organizing the jobless to vote this fall and to demand help from lawmakers. They’re not out to behead Beck and the royalist Republicans, just dethrone them.

MERS can’t foreclose, Citibank can’t collect. Talk about a catch 22. And it’s all their own fault.

After hearing Mr. Gibbs’ remarks about “the professional left” needing drug testing, my blood began to boil. This diary is an attempt to share a slice of the middle America pie which has valid complaints about the job left undone by President Obama. Sure, Obama has tried — but when you are bleeding to death, a bandaid is little comfort.

There a many reasons why 2010 will go down as a record year, the amount of oil spilled, the historic legislation that was passed, the hottest average temperatures ever observed in the US. All these will be indicators of a year that in the words of the ancient Chinese curse were “interesting times”. This morning we have another looming on the horizon. So far this year foreclosures are running at 10 times their average.

In any given year in the United States there are around 100,000 foreclosures. This year Reality Track, the folks who keep track of the numbers of foreclosed houses, says that there have been 528,000 foreclosures so far, if this pace continues then the end of 2010 will see one million family homes foreclosed on.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

This is another clear sign that the economy has not recovered. The foreclosed homes will eventually be put on the market, where they will increase the supply and decrease the price of homes in their neighborhoods. If it were just a few neighborhoods, we might be able to shrug and look the other way, but the reality is that we are talking about a significant number of the total privately owned homes in the U.S. being repossessed by the banks.

Betting on the inevitable.

Christian groups are trying to create a run around health care reform by setting up alternative, unregulated religious health care bill collectives—and movement conservatives are cheering them on.

There is a glitch in the system. Alan Greenspan famously said after the collapse that he had “found a flaw” in his free market ideology. He added, “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief.”

Welcome to part three of this series. I am writing about the process of bankruptcy from the inside for a couple of reasons. First, it is so mind numbing and overwhelming that I have to do something. Since I write, well, that is what I do to get things straight in my own head. The second reason is the more important one, the hope that having some record of this experience out there will help someone, anyone, who has to go through this process in the future. If you are interested in how Liz and I got here and what going and talking to the lawyers is like you can find those installments at the links below:

My Bankruptcy – An American Story 1
My Bankruptcy – An American Story 2

This installment has a lot of personal stuff, so if that is not to your taste, you can probably skip this one. One of the things I have found with this process is how easy it is to get frozen; to find yourself with many things to do in order to get the process going and finished by being completely unable to face it.

The Nuns used to say that procrastination is its own punishment, you suffer while you avoid your work, then you still have to do the work. This is exactly where Liz and I find ourselves. We start to work on it, then find that any other work is more compelling. Do a little work and then its “Oh! I think the grout in the second bathroom needs to be cleaned” or “This book shelf would really be better if it was alphabetized” or “Who want to clean out the gutters?” Anything at all to avoid this