Naples Couple Throws Florida Mortgage Payment Party
Not being able to pay the bills is rarely a cause for celebration.
But after a first try at home ownership landed a San Carlos Park couple in a deep financial bind, Amanda Stark, 30, and Bill Berry, 34, were willing to try anything to shave away at their Florida mortgage debts - even partying.
They’re throwing a benefit bash this weekend in the yard of their two-story, yellow-painted home at 8496 Cypress Drive North, the home they’re fighting to keep. Starting at 1 p.m. Saturday, they’ll offer barbecue, burritos and live music to all comers.
Then they’ll pass the hat, again and again if they have to.
Everything they collect will help them hang onto their hopes of raising their 2-year-old son Patrick in a home they own in a neighborhood they love.
The route the family is taking — a please-help-us party — might be unusual, but the circumstances are not. A rapid runup in Florida housing prices followed by a steep decline in the housing market and years of a financial climate in which risky loans became commonplace have led to record home-foreclosure levels across the country and in Southwest Florida.
The family’s most pressing worry right now is the $3,500 they owe Lee County in past-due property taxes. That debt could eventually force a sale of their home. They’re also struggling to keep up with $1,800 monthly Florida mortgage payments.
“We’re just trying to do everything we can,” Berry said, be that a benefit party or the “4 sale” in their yard next to a memory-filled 1983 27-foot Fleetwood Tioga RV. “We’re not giving up.”
There’s no single reason this family is having a hard time. Name a problem in the local and national real estate market right now — from unconventional Florida mortgages to the slowdown in new construction — and some part of their story reflects it.
They bought their 10-year-old home when prices were high in June 2006, eager to leave behind a rental in Cape Coral. They paid $241,000 for the 1,980 square-foot home, many times the $65,000 the property was worth a decade ago.
With that history of appreciation, Berry and Stark said, they never expected the value of a home so near a university and new development would decrease. The fact the home was appraised that summer for $40,000 more than what the seller took for it might have been a sign, but at the time, Stark said, “We thought we were getting a good deal.”
If they put their home on the market today, though, a real estate agent told them Friday, they’d likely face a $25,000 loss. And while mentioning the word foreclosure makes Berry visibly wince, it’s a gamble they’re taking as they put off selling in hopes the construction job market will turn around soon.
Things would be easier — maybe even fine — if only Berry still made up to $6,000 a week as a carpenter, working jobs at the Coconut Point mall and helping with rebuilding in Charlotte County after Hurricane Charley. These days, though, with the slowdown in new construction, a very good week for Berry would bring in half of that amount. Recently, he has only been able to find three or fours days worth of work in a week.
“And I’m no slouch,” Berry said. He’s at the point he half-wishes for a hurricane or two this season so the work would pick up, he said.
Stark is in the service industry as a restaurant manager in the Naples housing market. She doesn’t make enough to begin to carry the mortgage alone, though it’s in her name. That happened, the couple said, because they were told it would make the loan more likely to be approved.
The terms they borrowed under aren’t helping, either. It’s an 80-20 arrangement, a deal that allowed the couple to avoid a down payment, borrowing 80 percent of the purchase price at a higher-than-normal interest rate, then financing the rest through a second mortgage, sometimes called a piggyback Florida mortgage. But it comes with an adjustable interest rate that will start taking their monthly payments even higher next summer.
Stark is still sorting through the particulars of her Florida mortgage, but at the moment, it’s clear she owes more than the home is worth. In hindsight, she said, it was a risky deal, though it seemed all-so simple at the time.
Losing their home — either by selling at a loss now or through a forced sale later — is a real possibility, and it has Berry worried. He doesn’t know what they’d do, but they’d probably leave the state.
“There’s not a moment in the day, even when you’re sleeping, when you don’t think about it,” he said, watching his son play in the home’s living room Saturday afternoon. “I don’t cry about what’s going on. I cry about why I can’t fix it.”
The family knows of at least one other couple in the area who have fallen about six months behind in their Florida home mortgage payments, and the San Carlos Park neighborhood is full of “for sale by owner” and “for rent” signs. There are four such signs on their block.
Stark said she isn’t sure why they’re selling, but she has her suspicions.
“People don’t really talk about it,” she said. “I think the reason I’m more comfortable talking about all this and putting it out there is that I think I’m not alone. In fact, I know I’m not alone.”
In their frustration, Berry and Stark clipped out the listings of foreclosures and other forced sales in the county — both as evidence they’re not the only ones struggling and as motivation to avoid that result.
A calendar kept by the Lee County Clerk of Courts office shows that at least 35 foreclosure sales are set for the week ahead, between now and the couple’s party. Then there is the much longer list of sales for delinquent property taxes.
“I just don’t want to be on that list,” Berry said.
So they’ll just keep hoping, working, and going about their lives. This week, they’ll clean up their yard, clean out their RV and ask their friends and family to show up this weekend.
If nothing else, they said, it should be one great party.
SOURCE: The Naples News
