Lost in the fog

By Allison Brophy Champion

Published: May 4, 2008

JEFFERSONTON — The Hopkins family, like thousands of other families across the country, is losing their home.

The four-bedroom house on the northern end of Culpeper County is in foreclosure and the Hopkins — dad Ray, 52, mom Gay, 49, and their two teenage sons — have until June 17 to pack up and leave the home they’ve lived in since 1996.

Ray, the primary breadwinner, compared the process to being off course.

“Just imagine being on a road and you don’t know where you’re at,” he said. “It’s foggy, you have a flat tire and you want to walk to get help, but what do you do?”

“You’re lost: that’s what it feels like,” Mr. Hopkins said of his crash course in how foreclosures work.

Ray and Gay, married 23 years, don’t want sympathy. But they want other families like them to come out of the shadows.

“I would like it to be an article that delivers some hope,” said Gay. “I want other people going through this to be encouraged knowing someone else understands their pain.”

Being in foreclosure was embarrassing at first, said Ray, and it was a difficult decision to open up about how he and his wife got to where they are today.

“But people need to realize that hey, this doesn’t just happen to people who let their house run down and don’t care,” he said. “I’ve seen how the housing market goes up and down and what concerns me is that people don’t need to be alone in this.”

Reach out to friends, family and your church, said Ray, and don’t be ashamed.

“If more people talked about it, maybe something good could come out of my foreclosure.”

How it happened
Ray and Gay bought their house in a secluded subdivision 12 years ago for $159,900.

Times were good and it was their dream home, the second house the Hopkins had owned since moving from Bealeton in adjoining Fauquier County.

“We came out here and we fell in love with it,” said Gay. “By moving across the line, we got more house and more land.”

Ray, who grew up in Nokesville, had steady employment and Gay, who grew up in southwest Virginia, helped contribute financially by selling Avon.

Then came a series of job layoffs and changes. They had no savings to see them through and too much credit-card debt.

They borrowed against the house and took out a second mortgage.

A few years ago, Ray was laid off from a Culpeper-based manufacturing facility when “the work dried up,” he said.

So he got a job at a car dealership in Warrenton as a service writer, keeping track of repair orders, but soon got laid off from the position. Ray next tried his hand at selling cars, but there was never a steady paycheck.

“It was strictly commission, so there would be weeks he had no paycheck or weeks he had $18,” said Gay, who now works part-time as a clerical assistant at The Persecution Project, a Culpeper-based aid organization.

“That’s not even covering the gas back and forth to the job.”

Desperate to make ends meet, Ray juggled a variety of minimum wage jobs, making $6 or $7 an hour; he even tried a stint at McDonald’s. It didn’t cut it.

“It still would not have saved us because we had a lifestyle when his salary was removed we couldn’t maintain it,” Gay said.

They started to fall behind on their mortgage.

Gay subsequently borrowed money from her sister for one payment. Ray’s dad lent them money for another month, but it wasn’t enough.

“We were probably running three months behind, but we kept borrowing on the assumption that (the mortgage company) had different programs where they would take the payments you were behind on and either add a little more to your monthly payment or put it to the end of note,” he said.

At the advice of their lender, Ray said, they filed for bankruptcy. “They said get rid of your personal debt and we can work with you.”

The couple attended consumer credit counseling, vowing to do everything they could to keep the house, but there were few lifelines left.

Leave a message
Ray said he tried and tried to work out a deal with the mortgage company, but most of the time he got an automated voice when he called the 800-number to the company’s call center in Maryland.

He filled out paperwork for participation in a foreclosure prevention program and faxed it in. The company claimed to not have got it, Ray said.

He never talked with the same banking representative twice. Someone would return his calls eventually, Ray said, but never to his work number so he always missed them, and it was back to talking to machines.

In the midst of trying to work something out, Gay added, their original lender merged with a larger entity and their application for a refinancing got lost.
Then they were denied.

“Then we had to do it all over again later on,” she said. “I didn’t have a feeling it was consistent.”

At one point, Ray said, he had enough money for a single payment, but the lender wouldn’t take it since he owed for three months — along with the associated penalties and fees.

“A lot of times, you’d be talking to somebody and they’d say, ‘Let me transfer you over to this department,’ and you’d wait and wait and then you’d get voice mail,” he said.
Ray insisted he was not looking for a handout.

“I understand that we reneged on our mortgage, but I can remember growing up in the days when banks and mortgage companies would help you,” he said. “I wasn’t asking for them to forgive what I was going to pay; I was going to pay it.”

There were times Ray would pray before calling his lender, but he never got the answer for which he hoped.

“This was our dream home,” he said. “That’s part of the problem — it’s God’s home and we didn’t really take that good of care of it.”

The house went to foreclosure auction on the steps of the Culpeper County Courthouse last month on Gay’s birthday.

No bids were received.

A friend of Ray and Gay asked the auctioneer if the bank would now work with the couple since there were no takers.

“She said, ‘No, they’re done with them,’ ” Ray recalled.

Lessons learned
The couple, members of Hope Community Church of the Nazarene, which meets in Floyd T. Binns Middle School in Culpeper, attributed their hope amid their financial crisis to faith — in God and each other.

“The only comforting thing is to know that my wife has been supportive and my kids and honestly because God has been there,” said Ray. “Any other time I would probably be cussing somebody every 15 minutes.

“Again, I take responsibility for it, but this should never happen again in this country where people are losing their homes every day.”

Gay said God works with what people give him and that the experience will only make her faith stronger.

“A lot of times we depend upon ourselves and when you get to the end of yourself and have nothing left to depend on, you get a different perspective and priorities than before.”

No, her family did not deserve to lose their home, Gay said. But then again, she didn’t feel like she deserved the salvation she found in Christ.

“I believe that he’ll help us get through this. I believe he will,” Gay said.

And when he does, said Ray, there will be some changes.

“If you can’t afford it, don’t put it on credit,” he said of lessons learned. “Make sure you know everything there is to know about your mortgage when you go to closing. If you don’t ask, they don’t have to tell you.”

Save your money.

Gay, looking around her living room, struggled with the thought of giving it up. But she too has hope for better days.

“I’m a hoarder. I’ve got a lot of stuff,” Gay said. “It’s incredibly painful to have to make decisions because I can’t take it all with me. That definitely was way out of hand,” she added, “so I’m hoping to come out of this a lot lighter.”

By Friday afternoon, Ray was happy to report that he had secured a decent and large enough rental house in adjoining Madison County that they’ll start moving into later this month.

Gay said her family would stay together, but worried about other families nationwide that wouldn’t make it through foreclosure intact. Ray repeated: they are not alone.

“Everyone feels like they are the only one, and this is a small community and people talk,” he said. “Well, let them talk.

“I’m not the perfect Christian, nobody is, and in my opinion, every house that goes into foreclosure, we’re that much closer to going into a depression.”

From the bank
Friday morning at 11:30, this reporter called the 800-number Ray used to contact his mortgage company, CitiMortgage, a member of Citigroup, which is based in New York City.

“The CitiMortgage team is dedicated to helping you achieve your dream of home ownership,” a recorded voice said over and over again for 12 minutes, when an operator answered the call.

She confirmed that the call center is located in Maryland, but did not know the corporate media relations number.

At 11:48 a.m., this reporter called the corporate headquarters of CitiMortgage in St. Louis, Missouri and got an answering machine.

A few minutes later, Leah Johnson, reached via phone in the NYC office of Citigroup, referred this reporter to Mark Rogers who represents CitiMortgage in public relations.

His voice mail picked up and a message was left.

Rogers returned the call later Friday, and said CitiMortgage has several programs designed to keep people in their homes, referring to a recent report on home-ownership preservation.

The lender works with government, nonprofit and other outreach programs in foreclosure cases, he said.

“We are able to keep people in their homes five times more than they are foreclosed on,” Rogers said, “if and when they desire to stay in their homes and have a regular income.”

He said he would have someone look into the Hopkins’ situation after learning that the family does, in fact, now have regular income.

The Virginia Beach law office of Samuel White is representing CitiMortgage in the Hopkins’ foreclosure, Ray said.

White, reached by phone Friday, was hesitant to comment, but was polite. He said his office has been representing lenders in foreclosures since 1961.

“I have no personal contact with the property owner except to provide them with all the legal notices that are required,” White said, noting that his office follows the law in such matters.

He said he’s seen plenty of recessions through the years, an economic reality that “has a tendency to accelerate foreclosures,” White said.

“This is probably the worst I’ve ever seen.”

Allison Brophy Champion can be reached at 825-0771 ext. 101 or .

2008 on pace to exceed last year
The first four months of the year have not been good for struggling Culpeper County homeowners.

County records show that from Jan. 1 through April 24, 109 houses went into foreclosure along with another 27 lots for a total of 136.

In 2007, Culpeper experienced 180 foreclosures compared to just 33 in all of 2006.

Of the 136 foreclosures so far this year, 98 occurred in the town of Culpeper with the remaining 38 in various areas of the county.

Many of the town’s foreclosures happened along Sperryville Pike, Route 522, in any of various new housing developments that went up swiftly in recent years.

Along with the rapid growth came questionable lending practices and first-time homeowners anxious to get into new houses they could not really afford.

Lakeview, the town’s largest new subdivision on 522 leads the way in foreclosures at 17 — seven of those occurred on Holly Crest Drive, the hardest hit street so far this year.

Redwood Lakes, adjacent to Lakeview, was not far behind with 14 foreclosures so far, five on Windermere Drive.

The Meadows of Culpeper, on the northeast edge of town, had 11 foreclosures this year followed by Highpoint on Orange Road with seven.

—Allison Brophy Champion