Early 2000 I was living in an apartment in Halls, Tennessee (East Knoxville); a nice little town surrounded by everything I needed. It was at this point that I made one of the dumbest decisions a person could make: I purchased a new single-wide mobile home! I bought the largest single-wide they had with extras.
I should have realized I was making a bad decision. First, the lots that could accommodate a trailer of this size were expensive and limited, and that forced us to move to Clinton, which was an additional 30 minutes from where I worked. Second, after having the trailer delivered, setting it up and signing a one-year lease with the lot (as if I was going to move it somewhere), my payment went from $375 to $675 plus utilities. Third, this was $100 more than I was paying in rent for our apartment but with less living space and more responsibility; I was now obligated to stay.
The trailer was comfortable for living and the commute became normal (it was manageable with gas prices around $1.60 a gallon). Deciding to go to Louisville, Kentucky, to get my CDL (commercial driver license) would be my second dumb mistake. I was adding up mistakes fast by this point. While in Kentucky for a month the new single-wide was being looked after by a roommate, who come to find out destroyed the place and additionally everything in it was stolen or destroyed. There were holes in walls, fireworks popped in the living room and doors broken open. Breaking into a trailer door is about as difficult as bending cardboard. Even the power was off, but luckily the neighbor let us run an extension cord over for a few bucks, so we had a light and TV.
Being basically homeless and jobless by this point and living in a town away from everything I do, I proceeded to let the mortgage skip by that month and the next couple. A little later before my credit would be completely ruined by the mortgage company, I bought a TOE (take over equity) loan on a double-wide from the same lender in my girlfriend’s name, where I still live today. I settled the foreclosure for around $6,000 cash on my credit report (half what they wanted). The foreclosure became a nightmare for eight years before I was finally able to put this double-wide in my name. I eventually had to threaten to leave and didn’t pay a cent for three months on the newer loan before they agreed to let me sign the loan with my wife. I had nothing to lose and they knew it, because my credit was already shot and the house wasn’t in my name.
The mortgage company harassed me for years and ruined my credit for many more for a single-wide that I lived in for less than five months. About a year later, after many phone calls, my homeowners insurance paid me for the theft, though none of the damage. Everything I owned, down to my clothes, apparently was worth a little over $3,000 that I spent on a used car (a Ford Taurus) that I totaled two weeks later and woke up in a hospital with a busted lung and a little amnesia. One thing I didn’t forget was making a $5,000 cash down payment to get into a new single-wide and $6,000 cash payment to get rid of it in foreclosure.
