My Story - Part 2

When I left my home that November day, I stood out front for the last time. I looked at the house and remembered back to when my ex and I first were thinking of buying it. We'd walked over to the house one evening, after dark, and just stood in the neighborhood looking around. We felt this huge sense of anticipation and excitement. I remember standing there, alone, and for a moment feeling overwhelmed with grief. The wave passed, and I climbed into my truck and drove away. I didn't look back.

I wasn't exactly sure where to go, so I decided to head for one of the county campgrounds. Since it was winter, they allowed campers to stay for 3 months. During the summer, they only allowed a 14-day maximum stay unless you worked as a camp host (which required 20 hours/week labor in exchange for free rent) so I knew I'd have to find another place.

My bankruptcy was discharged in January of 1998, and I remember feeling oddly empty when I received the discharge letter. I didn't give it a whole lot of thought, though I was relieved at being able to start using the credit cards that I'd been able to keep through the bankruptcy to buy gasoline for my commute. It made me nervous to go to the ATM after work, and I didn't like carrying around a lot of cash.

The following February, my aging Toyota truck started giving me a little trouble. It had over 181,000 miles on it, and it was slowly dying. It wasn't being helped by the fact that I was frequently towing a heavy trailer around, so on a lark I called a local auto lot. I was curious to see if it were even possible for someone in my circumstances to buy a bigger truck. To my surprise, they said yes, and I ended up with a secondhand full-size pickup. The loan terms were terrible at 21% interest, but I paid extra every month with the idea that I would pay it off early.

I ended up staying at the county campground for the full three months, and the ranger even offered me the opportunity to work as a camp host. I couldn't figure out how to juggle my full time job, plus the responsibilities of camp host. Truthfully, I wasn't too keen on the idea of cleaning public restrooms every day (and this was part of the job) so I thanked the ranger but declined. As it was, the move turned out to be necessary. That year was the winter of some very severe storms, and I couldn't make it in to work for a couple of days because of road closures. The power was out in the campground for nearly a week, and my trailer was narrowly missed by a falling tree during one of the storms. Fortunately, I had been looking the entire three months to look for another parking space, and I found another spot that didn't require a credit check. I moved in, and for a trailer park, it was actually pretty decent, since it mostly catered to tourists, but allowed a small number of long-term residents.

When I moved into the trailer, I always figured it was going to be a temporary arrangement, but things kept happening to keep me there. Almost a year after I began my trailer odyssey, a tree that hadn't been properly trimmed dropped a giant branch on my roof in the middle of the night. It totaled the trailer, causing more than $11,000 worth of damage to a trailer that was worth perhaps $5,000.

Although I'd expected that living in the RV would help my post-bankruptcy recovery, in some respects it made things harder. I couldn't get a loan for a replacement trailer partly because my credit sucked, and partly because I didn't have a "permanent address." I still wasn't able to rent an apartment for the same reason. Fortunately, I discovered I could borrow money from my 401(k) plan at work, which I'd been funding to the max. With the money I got from the insurance payoff, plus money I borrowed from my retirement account, I was able to buy another, slightly bigger, secondhand trailer. I also paid off the loan for my secondhand pickup, since the interest rate was much lower.

Every few months, I'd try to look into apartments, but never did manage to come up with anything. The apartments that might be willing to talk to me were in terrible neighborhoods and wouldn't accept my pets, so I kept living in the trailer. One month stretched to three, which stretched to six months and then a year. At the 18-month mark, my current partner decided to move in. Things were definitely cramped, but we were both working, so it wasn't too bad.

Things were going along fine and we were starting to build a little nest egg when I was unexpectedly laid off during the summer of 1999. It took me three months to find another job, and I had to take a $12,000/year pay cut. A few months later, my partner was laid off. We ended up at the same company, where we worked until the end of 2000. Then we both lost our jobs when the company started having financial problems. We ended up starting our own custom software development company since one of our former employer's clients had some web programming they wanted done. Our former company wanted out of the custom software business, so we were on our way.

We ended up living and working in that tiny 22' travel trailer for nearly a year before we got to the point where we couldn't stand it any more. We were fighting constantly because we were so cramped for space, and our dining table was cluttered with laptops and a printer so we could work. We had a server on the floor in front of the refrigerator, and reference manuals piled everywhere. I started calling apartments again, and this time they had three reasons not to rent to us: 1) We had a dog (my cat had ended up moving in with my father since my partner turned out to be violently allergic); 2) I had a previous bankruptcy and they looked at both our credit histories; and 3) we were self-employed and couldn't show steady self employment for two years. We were stuck.

I called around to all the local homeless service agencies to see if they might be able to issue us a referral for housing. Although we technically met their requirements for being "homeless" since we didn't have a permanent address at the the trailer park, and the RV technically wasn't designed for full-time, year-round living, they couldn't help us because we were considered single adults. The homeless problem in our county was so bad that they would only serve single mothers with children. Couples (married or not) or single people weren't eligible for assistance. The best they could offer us was a cot in the local homeless shelter, which was a step down from where we were living.

After nearly four years of trailer living, I was ready to give up on the nomadic lifestyle. After nearly three years of trailer life, my partner was just about ready to kill me! We mentioned our dilemma to a friend, who happened to know a "friendly" mortgage broker. It turned out after a certain about of finessing (translation: lying) on the application forms, my partner was eligible to get a no-doc loan for a honest-to-goodness real home. We'd applied together, but at the last minute we had to withdraw my name from the application because it turned out the only bank willing to loan on a self-employed, no-doc loan was the same mortgage company that had taken it in the shorts on my mobile home four years prior. They were, understandably, still holding a grudge.

We found a very good real estate agent, and she helped us find halfway decent homes that were relatively inexpensive. When I say relatively, that doesn't mean that the prices weren't absolutely, heart-poundingly shocking. The housing market was starting to go through the roof, and houses that sold for $100,000 a few years before were now selling for double that amount. Although our friends encouraged us to take on a bigger loan, I was terrified that we'd run into financial problems if we did. We bought the least expensive 3 bedroom/1.5 bath we could find that had space for our RV. We signed a deal, I handed over my down payment to my partner, who in turn gave it to the escrow company. The loan was granted, and a quit-claim deed was filed to add my name to the title a few weeks after the loan closed. Virtually all our savings were eaten up by the downpayment, but the place was ours!

In September of 2001, right after the World Trade Center disaster and nearly four years of living in an RV, I finally had a home again...