(2/12/09) Celebrity realtor Carlos Justo adopts a Zen-like attitude towards personal bankruptcy and multiple home foreclosures as Miami’s once Hot luxury home market Cools off. Background Articles: “Connected, Fabulous … and Broke”: online.wsj.com Video: ABC NEWS

I purchased my house in a suburb outside of Detroit in 2004 for 7k which was one of those awesome 105% loans where the concessions paid for my closing costs.

The issues starts where my wife lost her job at the end of the first year of us owning it (causing us to go bankrupt on some credit card debt) but I could still make the house payments on just my income. Since then, gas is 4 to 5 times as much as it was then and of course inflation on food and everything else. So after being a stay at home mom for 4 years since she lost her job, we were behind one mortgage payment and she was forced to go back to work and our two children are now in child care and/or school.

We’ve already gave up all of our "luxury" stuff with the exception of cell phones and broadband internet. The cell phones though have no data or extra features, just 700 shared family minutes. We don’t leave the house except to go to work (an hour away each of us). We eat cheap foods that’s caused me to go up 2 pant sizes… We only eat out at McDonald’s and we order from the dollar value menu… Our cars are paid off but in order to afford the house while she was looking for a job we had to get a credit card to supplement the income so we have about ,000 in debt to Discover at 22% APR.

Now back to the house. We haven’t made any improvements on it (since we can’t afford the house in the first place let alone another loan) and the homes in my area/city are selling now for k on a short sale (some of them are bank owned but most of them are short sales). The homes in my area that are selling over (but under ) have garages and I unfortunately do not have one…

The deal is we would like to stay in this house if we can get Countrywide to agree to a forgiveness of debt since my mortgage is for 6% and I know I wouldn’t get approved for that again with my bad credit from the bankruptcy but last we tried to work with them they wanted us to be 2 months behind in our payments before they would talk with me about it (ruining my credit that I’ve recovered since bankruptcy). So I tried to refinance the house but they would only refinance what the house was worth leaving me with almost 40% negative equity to have to cover out of pocket… I lastly got approved for a mortgage (before my wife was back to work) and found a house I wanted but found that in order for me to move into the new house they wanted me to have my old one sell first to make sure I wasn’t renting out the new one since it was so much cheaper than the one that I owned (not in value but in mortgage amount)…

What do I do???

My house is 5 years old and I have a 10 year structural warranty. My home builder filed for bankruptcy 2 years ago. I have to have a beam in my basement, across my foundation that needs to be re-adjusted/re-set. How can I go after my old bankrupt builder to use my 10 year structural warranty, so I don’t have to pay for this work myself?