So you’ve already been in pre-foreclosure for months, your bank has agreed to a short sale, but do you know how to short sale your home to your best advantage or how to do it quickly?

This is what Kristin and I did: We found our own buyer. An Investor. We agreed to sell our home to him subject to him leasing it back to us immediately! We did a one year lease at the current market rent rate with the option to renew for up to 10 years.

You may not be able to put together the same kind of sweet deal that Kristin and I were able to make, but why not try it? Either way, by taking this particular bull by its horns, you’ll be able to move the short sale process along a lot faster than your mortgage holder will.

Why? That’s not hard to figure out when you think about it for a moment. The banks and other mortgage lenders are dealing with literally millions of foreclosures! Banks and mortgage lenders are having to learn a lot of new skills, and hire a lot of people, just to begin to keep up.

At the same time, more than 19 million homes in the US are vacant now, according to January figures released by the US Census Bureau. Sure, some of those homes are uninhabitable, but there’s still a very good chance that your short sale is facing some stiff competition.

So here are some ideas to move your short sale along more quickly:

• Before you do anything else, find a Realtor to help you with your short sale. Short sales are specialized transactions that take special expertise to make it happen. Kristin and I were able to handle our own short sale . . . but we were already qualified Realtors. Not just any Realtor can handle a short sale.

• Don’t stress about finding the right Realtor who is trained in short sales. Please contact us and we’ll help you find a professional, certified short sale Realtor who specializes in your area.

• Use the Internet. And we’re not just talking about Craigslist. If you’re on Facebook, if you have a list of your friends’ email addresses—post your short sale information. You don’t want to go emailing or posting the exact address or anything like that, but you can set things up so people can contact you about your short sale if they want more information.

• Post your short sale on the bulletin boards in grocery stores, coffeehouses, pretty much everywhere that people gather. You’d be surprised how many people stop and look at those things!

• Finally, you might even decide to pay to list your short sale in your local paper; that means it will almost certainly appear online as well.

Not many people know how to short sale quickly and well. But when it comes to getting word about your short sale out there, these tips will help!

To Learn ALL of our Tricks and Tips - Go Here and Check Out Our Book!

When we say, “double dip,” we’re not talking about a Baskin-Robbins treat—we’re talking about areas of the country where home values are dipping again, meaning that if you live in one, you might have an underwater mortgage again.

Either that or you’re getting underwater for the first time.

In March 2010, Bloomberg reported that, after recovering for a while, housing values started dipping again in 12 US cities. The article uses the phrase “double dip” to describe a situation where housing valued dropped the first time, recovered for about 5 months—and then started dropping again.

Homeowners in those areas were probably just starting to feel good that they’d be above water again. And that’s just sad.

In addition to the 12 markets already affected, the article says that 10 more seem poised to join them.

So what should you do if you’re being double dipped in deep mortgage water? Believe it or not, you do have options that don’t include paying that mortgage until the day you die or until you just can’t keep it up anymore.

Kristin and I ended up taking options that included walking away. Now, we’re responsible people. We’d always paid our bills, including our mortgages. But we’d also let ourselves be seduced by the real estate boom, and we started drowning financially when that boom went bust.

We decided we didn’t have to live like that. If you’re being double-dipped under even more financial water you don’t have to live like that, either.

That said, here is the list of markets that Bloomberg cites in its article:

Providence, Rhode Island; Boulder, Colorado Springs, and Greeley, Colorado; Augusta, Georgia; Columbus, Ohio; Harrisburg and Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Little Rock, Arkansas; Green Bay, Wisconsin; Greensboro, North Carolina; and Lincoln, Nebraska.

If you live in one of these areas, please do the research and learn what your home is valued at now! Then do the math on your mortgage—not the amount you borrowed, but the amount you’ll end up paying if you stick with the mortgage for the entire term.

If that second number is larger than the first, you’re in an underwater mortgage. And you’ve got some thinking to do. We’re here for you with all of the information we can find to help you make the right choices for your family.

You may remember earlier this year when the whole question of what people should do with an underwater mortgage was getting quite a bit of news coverage. The coverage was sparked by a report from a University of Arizona law professor who wrote a paper chiding people who, for one reason or another, were choosing to continue their mortgage payments rather than pursue a strategic default.

The mortgage industry was up in arms! The government chimed in! They were aghast—aghast!—at the idea that anyone would walk away from their God-given responsibility to remain yoked to their underwater mortgage until the day they died!

After all, how dare ordinary citizens do the kinds of things that large corporations do all the time?!?

Don’t believe us when we say that corporations walk away from their mortgages? Look at this article in the New York Times from January 2010: “The Way We Live Now: Walk Away From Your Mortgage!”

The NYT article gives one example that people were talking about at the time—Morgan Stanley’s decision to stop making payments on 5 office buildings. Why? Because their mortgages were underwater, that’s why!

There was a time when thinking twice about a strategic default was natural. You knew your mortgage holder, and he or she knew you. You were doing business with a local bank, and you knew your local bank was contributing to your community.

Now your mortgage gets sold by the original lien holder days or even minutes after you’ve signed it. And you can bet that, even in the doubtful event that your original mortgage holder actually cares about your community, the new one certainly doesn’t. Or the one after that.

We don’t owe mortgages to people anymore, if we ever did. We owe them to legal fictions driven by people who will walk all over us if they have to for a few more dollars of profit.

With those things in mind, what makes the most sense to you? Continuing to pay on your underwater mortgage or using a strategic default to save yourself tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars? The answer to that one isn’t really that hard at all.

There are no hard and fast rules about how long you’re likely to be able to live in pre-foreclosure and save the money you were throwing away on your mortgage. Generally, the foreclosure process is supposed to last about 6 months.

But that was before the real estate bubble burst and the tsunami of foreclosures hit. With literally millions of foreclosures to process, it’s taking banks longer than ever before—sometimes as long as 2 years—before the Trustee’s sale notice is finally served.

So at the very least you should have 6 months in pre-foreclosure. That’s how long it takes for the various institutions involved to cross their I’s and dot their T’s to make sure everything is nice and legal. At the most . . . you could have 2 years.

Multiply your mortgage payment by that. Because that’s the amount of money you’ll get to keep and save while staying in your home!

But if you’re in pre-foreclosure, the time to start making plans is now. You want to be prepared for the day it’s time to walk away. The first thing you need to do is realize that your house is not your home. Home is what you make of it—you and your family, together. You can be just as at home in a rental as in the house you’re in now—and after your foreclosure or short sale, you can enjoy that rental for a lot less than you’re paying now.

The next thing to do is to start getting ready for your eventual move. Kristin and I found that we actually enjoyed this phase of things—the throwing away, giving away, and garage selling away of all of the things we used to think were so important. Post-foreclosure and short sales, we’re living a lot lighter now—and enjoying our lives more.

Finally, be ready to move into your new place as soon as you know your house is being sold by the bank (the Trustee’s Sale Date), if you haven’t decided to initiate a short sale instead.  You don’t want your kids answering the door to the sheriff!

All of this might sound stressful, but really pre-foreclosure can be a pretty happy time. You’re out from under a crushing mortgage, you’re working together to make plans—and you’re saving money hand over fist. It may not always be the happiest process you’ll ever go through, but you’ll be much better off for it in the end.

If you’re one of the people who are hoping that your underwater mortgages will get back on dry land soon due to a real estate rebound, think again.

Housing prices depend on demand, and demand is way down. According to US Census Bureau figures published in May 2010, 14.5% of all of the homes in America are vacant. That’s 19.2 million houses available for sale or rent.

In addition, more than 7 million homes are in limbo right now. They aren’t on the market, but most of them are going to be. Right now they’re being held up because of impending foreclosures, short sales gone bad, and other reasons.

So what does this mean for your underwater mortgage? Unless you live in an area that’s about to experience a huge economic boom, it means that you’ll be staying underwater unless you do something to drag yourself out.

On the other hand, the tidal wave of foreclosures means that most banks are totally glutted with houses. Banks aren’t set up to manage and sell properties. Banks are set up to commit as much usury as possible by charging us the highest interest rates they can.

This supply and demand situation puts people who want to strategically default on their underwater mortgages in a good position. For one thing, your bank doesn’t want your house. It really doesn’t. This means that if you stop making mortgage payments, it could take as long as 2 years before you need to be out of your house.

That’s a lot of time to save money for the future instead of putting it into a mortgage. It also gives you a long time to negotiate with the bank, if that’s possible, because you’ll have shown the bank you’re serious about not paying more than your house is worth.

So if you’re one of the people stuck with underwater mortgages, please don’t think that a rising housing market is going to save you in the near future. It almost certainly won’t!

If you have not read “The Underwater Mortgage – How To Survive Your Sinking Ship While Keeping Your Sense of Humor,” yet – do it now – it will help you!

The underwater mortgage may just be the last symbol of your past way of life—a way of life that was really a huge mistake in the first place.

Remember the 1980s movie Wall Street? Remember how much we all wanted to be like Gordon Gekko? And remember just how important it was to us to have everything the Jones’ had, but better?

Seems like kind of a bad dream now, doesn’t it? It was a dream that led a lot of us—Kristin and me included—to buy more house than we could hope to afford. In our case, we bought several more houses, thinking as long as the real estate boom kept going our way, we would be financially set.

Just like you did. Just like 11.1 million Americans who are now facing underwater mortgages did. Because we didn’t know that that boom was really just a bubble. A beautiful but fragile bubble that came pretty close to destroying our entire economy when it popped.

And all because we wanted to keep up with the Jones’.

So what’s life going to be like once we recover from that popped bubble? Can there be life—a good life—after an underwater mortgage?

Kristin and I are proof that it’s not just possible—it’s within easy reach. The first thing we have to give up, though, is this stupid idea that the family with the most toys wins. After all, what does all that stuff do when we’re not using it? It collects dust. And eventually it’s all going to rot, anyway.

But now that Kristin and I are spending more time with each other and our kids instead of spending time worrying about how to pay the mortgages, our family is doing better than ever.

Who knows? In 5 years or so, we all just might look back on The Years of the Underwater Mortgage as a gift—a gift that brought us to our senses.

Don’t worry—you don’t have to suit up in SCUBA gear to measure how deep you are with your underwater mortgage. Though you may feel differently, mortgages are just pieces of paper with numbers and legal terms on them. Even if you’re underwater and struggling, this is not a life-or-death situation unless you make it into one!

Ready to proceed? Great! To measure your underwater mortgage, take a look at the difference between what your home is worth now and the total amount of your mortgage.

And we mean the total amount—not the amount that you borrowed, but the amount that you will have paid the lending institution at the end of your 15-, 20-, or 30-year loan.

You’ll probably want to be sitting down while you’re doing this, because the number may well hurt at first, especially if you’re one of the 1 in 10 homeowners who owe at least 25% more than your house is currently worth.

Ouch! That’s not just underwater—that’s the bottom of the ocean!

Now we want you to create a second set of figures. Let’s say that you decided to pay rent rather than keep paying on that underwater mortgage for the next 15 to 30 years. Let’s say that the amount of rent you’re going to pay is going to stay roughly half the amount of your mortgage payments—because that’s about how rents vs. mortgages are stacking up these days.

Take your current mortgage payment, cut it in half, and then multiply that number by 12 (the number of months in a year) and again by 15 (the minimum number of years).

Look at that figure. Wouldn’t you really rather have that money in your bank account and not in your lender’s account? We thought so—at least, that’s what we decided to do.

So if you’re ready to get out from under your underwater mortgage, let us help. We’re here for you!

The slide in U.S. home prices may have another three years to go,” reported Bloomberg just yesterday, “as sellers add as many as 12 million more properties to the market.”

Bloomberg cited the research of Morgan Stanley analyst Oliver Chang, who examined a phenomenon we’ve long chronicled in this space — the “shadow inventory.” That’s all the homes in foreclosure that lenders are keeping off the MLS, lest they flood the market and push down prices even further than they already are.

“The issue is there’s more supply than demand,” says Chang. “Once you reach a bottom, it will take three or four years for prices to begin to rise 1 or 2% a year.”

Coming onto the market soon — 95,364 more bank repossessions that took place during August. That’s a record high, according to RealtyTrac.

But lenders sent out 5.5% fewer default notices compared to a year ago. That means there’s even more shadow inventory backing up in the pipeline. “There is a buildup in delinquent loans that are not in foreclosure,” says RealtyTrac’s Rick Sharga. “It’s a managed slowdown more than anything else.”

So the slide in prices goes on: Home prices in July were flat compared to a year earlier, according to CoreLogic. It was the first month since January that prices didn’t register a year-over-year increase, however meager. In 36 states, prices outright fell — the highest number since last November.

The number of home sellers who cut their prices grew in August for the third straight month, according to the real estate website Trulia. 26% of sellers cut their prices, the highest percentage since last October. The average price cut was 10%.

What could turn this around? “When we see job growth across America,” says Trulia CEO Pete Flint, “we can begin to discuss stability in the housing market.” (Good luck with that: First-time jobless claims fell a paltry 3,000 last week, to 450,000. That total needs to be at least 100,000 less to signal economic growth.)

Even people who don’t worry about their jobs are giving up on the American Dream. Last weekend, the San Francisco Chronicle profiled a couple who qualified in 2006 for a $625,000 mortgage… yet was priced out of the market.

Fast-forward four years and prices are down… but now the couple qualifies for a mortgage of only $280,000. “Our incomes haven’t changed, but the rules have changed,” the husband says, “so we don’t really talk about buying houses anymore. We’ve shelved it.” We suspect they’re not alone.

There’s another problem facing the housing market this fall, one that a sharp-eyed reader reminded us of recently…

“Do you have a ‘we are here’ plot of the Alt-A/subprime, etc., in an upcoming 5?” the reader asks. Ah, the famous Credit Suisse chart of adjustable-rate mortgage resets.

“I think Alt-A is going to spike in September-October, so it would be nice to see that one again in an updated form.”

Ask and ye shall receive. And the reader is right: We should hit a peak in resets next month… with an even-higher peak coming late next year.

“The government’s mortgage modification programs have been a complete failure,” says Dan Amoss, assessing Uncle Sam’s attempts to prop up the market. “They have not addressed the problem of negative home equity.

“The level of home equity is the leading predictor of mortgage defaults and foreclosures,” Dan explains. “With housing prices set to weaken once again, we could see several months of self-feeding downward spiral: In an environment of weak housing demand, selling adds pressure to prices, which begets more selling… There’s still more room to the downside for prices to return to pre-housing bubble levels.

“In banking, they often say, ‘The first loss is the best loss.’ With a renewed downturn in housing prices, we could see a rush to liquidate the ‘real estate owned’ that’s been sitting on bank and GSE balance sheets waiting for a rebound.” So the trickle of shadow inventory hitting the market now could soon become a flood.

That would trigger another severe down leg in housing. Remember, the first caused immense pain and staggering losses — except for the handful of people who knew it was impossible for home prices to rise 10% per year into perpetuity.

If there’s one thing that Kristin and I know—both as real estate professionals ourselves and as people who have walked away from an underwater mortgage or actually twelve—it’s that knowledge is power.

When you’re under water on your mortgage and you’re considering walking away from it, everybody’s going to have an opinion. Your family and friends will all give you different advice. God knows your mortgage lender is going to have an opinion! And you’re going to see everything in the editorial section from, “Screw the banks! Walk away!” to “People who default on their mortgages are irresponsible scumbags.”

You don’t need anyone’s opinion right now except your own. What you need are facts.

So how do you get the facts about underwater mortgages?

Keep on top of the headlines including the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and financial publications. A lot of this stuff is online for free. Bookmark any banking industry news websites you can find as well.

In addition, focus on your local situation by keeping tabs on real estate values and home sales in your community. This information is a matter of public record, and you should be able to get it for free on your city’s or county’s website.

And, of course, Kristin and I are here for you through our website, which we’re updating with new information as it comes out.

The final thing you need to do is to keep tabs on your home’s actual value. That’s the only way to keep tabs on just how far underwater you are.

Remember that you’re not alone in this situation—over a million people are right there with you, realizing that they’re at ocean’s bottom with their mortgages and weighing their options just like you are.

Maybe you just got screwed by the real estate market, no matter how careful you were. Or maybe, like so many of us, you got caught up in the mortgage frenzy of the past few years. So now you’re sitting underneath more house than you can afford and an underwater mortgage at the same time.

Either way, you don’t deserve to let your life be ruined by this. If You Would Like a FREE report titled “Underwater Secrets – What the Banks Don’t Want You to Know,” register using the form on the left of this page.