ex has left me in a no win situtation

[slewiss]

My longtime boyfriend and I purchased a house together and he has since moved out. The property has two mortgages. The first mortgage my ex-boyfriend pays by transferring money into my account and the second mortgage is currently being garnished from my pay check. I come to find out the irs has a lien on the house for my ex's back taxes he owes. The first mortgage is under my name only and the second mortgage is under both our names. The bank chose to garnish my paycheck for the second mortgage because my ex is self employed. The deed is also in both our names. I cannot afford the house on my own. How can I get out of this situation? 1) remove the garnishment. So I can afford another place to live. 2)remove the tax lien to short sell the home or settle with the bank.

 

[Michael Wechsler]

One of the most common problems we encounter here involves joint ownership of property. Splitting the baby is rarely easy and, in your instance, even more difficult. The answer to your question is easy - if you pay off your debt and your ex pays off his debt, the liens are removed. There is another situations where the liens can be removed. You sell the home and pay off the liens with the proceeds of the sale. If you do put the property on the market, you'll need to disclose this to your real estate agent (if you have one) or to a buyer, who will certainly run a lien search to determine whether there are more liens on the property than you are aware.

Let's assume that your ex-boyfriend's tax lien is larger than your lien. You'll want to have an agreement to split the proceeds so that you are compensated for your ex-boyfriends obligation being released. This is assuming that the proceeds of the sale exceed the liens. If the sale goes through at a loss, it is up to the lien holders to decide how to split the proceeds and to give consent to the sale of the home. You may want to sell the home now since it appears you cannot afford the home. If it goes into foreclosure, you'll have serious problems as you'll deal with interest issues, penalties from your bank as well as costs for attorneys' fees and auction fees. I don't know the details but this is what my gut feeling tells me about what you're sharing. Good luck.