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The original was posted on /r/newzealand by /u/Koreapsu on 2024-04-10 00:21:05.
I was loathe to post anything like this but after being a member here for 17 years now I've seen how sometimes this community really helps. And I'm desperate. I was standing in the shower this morning and it was the first time I've ever thought "How do I handle this?" I've always got a plan, and today is the first day I don't. I've gone through the mental health post
Background
I'm a guy in his 40s, married with 3 kids. We live on a lifestyle block on the Coromandel. It was the dream and I thought I'd spend my whole life here. Unfortunately, we took some bad advice, and made some bad decisions with good intentions, and now we're in a situation where our finance for our property ends in a couple of weeks and we'll lose our house.
With this looming, we decided to sell late last year, but with the main road to our area (SH25a) wrecked because of Gabrielle and not open until December there just weren't a lot of people coming to the area, and the locals were doing it very tough too. I run my own small business and it also suffered massively. After the years of covid, then the road isolating us in our "comeback" year it's been awful. There's no money. The business has come back to the area since the road opened, but it wasn't soon enough to save us.
The Family
The stress has been like nothing I could've imagined, and then at Easter my son had a seizure (for the first time) in the middle of the night, out of the blue. I thought I'd lost him. I was walking around outside at 3am with my boy's limp body in my arms. It's hard to even type about. Worst moment of my life.
We don't know what caused it, and they don't scan until he has more seizures, but right now I can't sleep much - I check on him constantly through the night. The whole family was already on edge, and now it's just 1000 times worse. I think I'm sleeping about 3 hours/night, often on the floor of his room.
My young daughters are feeling it too. The one that was always happy bursts into tears randomly, the other one is withdrawn and cold. My amazing wife who is as solid as a rock has broken down at the smallest things. And for me I'm just numb or angry, and I'm not generally an angry person. I get angry at the stupidest things. I think it's just a feeling that we've both worked so hard, ridiculously hard, and now we could lose everything and worse. I've spent the past 10 years working 80+ hours/week and it's come to this.
Now
At this point, I'd take coming out with nothing as a win, but coming out with a huge debt, and losing my business along with my house would be catastrophic. I can work from nothing, I built my current business from a fold-out table and a $100 Warehouse BBQ, but I can't face coming back from so far under.
So what I need is some advice. We can't refinance our home, and because it's a lifestyle block those home-buying companies aren't interested. We don't have cashed-up parents or anything like that, it's all just come from stupidly long hours and hard work. So there's no one to go to asking for money. We are 2 weeks away from the deadline and have lots of tyre-kickers looking at the property but no one committing yet. The finance company just want to see an offer, and they are happy to wait after that but people are just not urgent. We just dropped the price again today to almost $500k under the last valuation (3 months ago).
We're all over Facebook advertising the property. We're listed at Harcourts. We have signs out, we've run open homes. We're running out of time so fast.
Questions
- Should we arrange a last-day auction? Has anyone had any experience with this kind of thing?
- Does anyone know of any investor groups looking for a bargain? Our place is lovely, I hate having to leave. Nice house, avocado, plum, pear orchards, close to amazing beaches. It even produces an income from a local farmer running some cows on the land we don't look after. I wanted to live my whole life here, but being able to provide for my kids is the most important thing.
- Do you want to move out to the coast? Looking for an amazing place to live? Get in touch and I can provide details. I'm not sure if the mods would allow me to post my links here.
- Does anyone have any advice for kids with seizures? He spent time in the ER, and then went to our GP, but they won't refer him to a pediatrician unless it happens again and that just feels like waiting for a disaster.
- Am I over-reacting about the seizures? I've previously saved one of my daughters from choking when she would've died, and now hearing my boy and being the one on the spot with him, it's just wrecked me.
So there's the reddit post I never wanted to make. Can anyone help?
