For the next several weeks, HuffPost will be cross-posting "Foreclosure Horror Stories" from the Home Defenders League's "100 Stories Of What Wall Street Broke" series, which is collecting first-person accounts from homeowners around the country. Homeowners can submit their own stories here. The following post, which tells the story of Earl and Anne Favre from Decatur, Tenn., originally appeared in a slightly different form here.
My name is Earl Antoine Favre, Jr., and this concerns the end of my life as I know it.
I was happy and fairly financially secure. Then, on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina happened. I lost everything except the clothes on my back, the sandals on my feet and my three dogs, with whom I spent six hours on a roof waiting to be rescued.
At the Cajun Dome, days later, I begged a woman to let me use her cell phone. I called my son, who had evacuated to Houston before the storm, and he immediately came for me and my dogs. After six weeks at a motel in Houston, I purchased a truck and an RV so that I would have a place to live when I returned to New Orleans. My son had lost his home two blocks from mine. He moved his family to Tennessee to start a new life.
In March 2006, he invited me to come to Tennessee so that he could care for me because of my injuries and failing health as a result of the hurricane. I lived in my RV beside his house for a year, and then decided to build a house on the backside of my son’s 9.22 acres with cash from my retirement fund. In July 2007, my house was completed and I moved in.
Then, in 2008, the economy took a nosedive and my son began to struggle to pay his mortgage. Finally, in April 2010, my son had no choice but to vacate the property and return to Louisiana. My house, which I paid for in cash, is valued at $279,000 by State Farm.
On Feb. 7, 2013, my wife and I received a "notice of eviction" from Freddie Mac. Freddie Mac will give me $2,000 for relocation costs and take my $279,000 home if I’m out by March 24, 2013.
I’m 71 years old, an honorably discharged veteran of the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force, disabled and on Social Security. This seems like a huge slap in the face for all of our resources to be involved, leaving us homeless and broke.
I am only asking Freddie Mac to let me buy the acreage of my son's land on which my house is located at a fair market value so that I can finally live out my life in this place the hurricane landed me.
The Favres are working with Occupy Chattanooga to save their home from Freddie Mac, a company sponsored by members of the public like us. You can support them by signing on to their petition here.