Foreclosure is an evil thing to admit to. You admit your'e a bum, a cheat, a liar and broke. You admit to the world and your neighbors, that you are somehow not as good as everyone else. And you admit, you can't afford your home anymore. For a long while there, I probably shouldn't have felt so bad about it, it seems everyone I knew was facing some sort of financial downfall, but just the same, when they told me that my house was going into foreclosure, a sick feeling of despair set upon me and I knew I had been beaten. The reason why I fell behind in my payments started several years before the actual paperwork and sheriffs order to vacate came. It started well before I even missed my first payment. It started when I became the sole breadwinner in my home, and I realized my job was not paying enough to carry the whole enchilada. Truth be told I didn't really care to own the home. I lived on a boat year round, was quite happy to do my laundry at the laundromat and slept in 10 degree temps with my faithful pup cuddled up in my sleeping bag. I showered at the gym, ate dinner at the bar and only slept four hours a night anyway, so why did I need a home to do that? Turns out, I needed a home not for me, but for my family- my two dogs and a my cat. And another family member that I wasn't so proud to admit I lived with, my Mom. I didn't really live with my Mom, but when my Dad died so many years back, it kind of fell to me to care for her, so it was a tentative balance that she lived in the house and I lived on the boat. And we all could be most self respectable that way. Unfortunately in 2012, a great recession, a job loss, a fight for boaters rights, a dog bite incident and a freak October snow fall hit and that tentative balance was thrown into chaos. A so my life would change and my home would slide into Foreclosure, despite my fiercest attempts to fight it. It was early 2012, when I finally missed my first mortgage payment. That month, money was tight and I had been fighting with the bank to modify my mortgage payments since 2010. I couldn't pay my mortgage for the first time ever, but I had every intention of catching up the next month. The next month, it was same the deal, just not enough money. And then as the bills piled up, the job market slowed down and the dog managed to sneak out of the house and bite a bicyclist who wandered down the the dead end dirt road along my property line, the tide turned against me.