It’s March 19^th, 2010 and I’m still in the house.  At some point in the near or far future my lender, Bank of America, is going to foreclose on me and there's little if anything I can do about it.  I've been rummaging through solutions for over a year and finally ran out of ideas several weeks ago.  That’s when I expected the lender to foreclose on the house and kick my cat and me to the curb.  They didn’t and it’s beginning to annoy the feline.  He’s tired of all the false alarms.  Me, I’m too busy Google bombing my favorite ignominious phrases of yesteryear “axis of evil” and “evil doers” to link back to Bank of America and the other big banks that don’t like playing nice.  If executed properly it should keep them distracted from my foreclosure for at least a month as they foolishly try to rid the SEO stratosphere of all their negative references.

Once that’s all squared away I intend to turn my sights on the loan modification firms who prey upon the desperate, uninformed masses of delinquent borrowers facing foreclosure.  I’m thinking the appropriate phrase for that Google bomb should be “a Prius with functioning brakes”.  Their creatively catchy slogans like “Save Your Home!” or “Eliminate Foreclosure Now!” or “Cut Your Mortgage Payment In Half!” inspire me to get off my lazy butt and be proactive about my foreclosure situation.  I usually start by fixing myself a ham sandwich, wandering out to the backyard where I’ll spend an hour or two slowly munching on it and contemplating the miracle in Miracle Whip while watching the UV rays of the sun destroy the chlorine in the pool at the rate of .00543 ppm per hour.  After that I’m usually too tuckered out to do anything else.

If you take a gander at the ads to the right and left of this column and you’ll see what I’m talking about.  In full disclosure I should mention I made $0.16 off of people clicking on those ads and subsequently gambled it all away by purchasing 16 shares of a worthless penny stock.  Don’t worry; unless someone beats me to it I’m Google bombing myself as soon as I come up with the appropriate deprecating phrase.  Unfortunately “total jackass” has been used too many times.

Now that loan modification is widely accepted as the most ineffectual way to avoid foreclosure (even according to the Federal Government) a new business model has come along to take its place. A friend recently told me about a guy he knows who knows a guy who knows another guy that is paying a firm $500 per month to delay his foreclosure so he can stay in his house.  This is not exactly what I would call a solution to foreclosure but it the idea behind it makes fiscal sense when you consider the cost of rent.  In a city like Los Angeles I can expect to pay in the neighborhood of $1,500 a month in rent for a modest one-bedroom apartment (and that feels like a bargain when compared to where rents were during the housing bubble) so paying someone $500 a month to delay my foreclosure sounds awfully tempting.  That is until I ask myself the question, “Am I really going to pay someone to keep this albatross of a house hanging over my head?”  No thank you.  I’ve got a better idea:  I call it the “Ham Sandwich” approach and it doesn’t cost a dime.  Waste no more time and energy battling with the lender.  Simply make yourself a ham sandwich, head out to the pool and float listlessly on an inner tube and trust that everything will work itself out.  And then, after all of the chlorine has evaporated from the pool get the heck out before the bank comes along and pees in it.