she chose to freeze up and do nothing instead of fixing her situation. She chose to let a +200K equity get repossessed and taken instead of paying her taxes. S

she chose to freeze up and do nothing instead of fixing her situation. She chose to let a +200K equity get repossessed and taken instead of paying her taxes. She chose to let a 10K tax bill balloon into a 24K tax bill and then freak out and not pay them even though she had 200K+ in the "bank". To get the money in the "bank" (her equity) she'd have had to do some financing and take some action. She didn't. She chose to "petition the court" to ask if she had the right to sell which was sadly a waste of time because it's not the courts job to answer such things. Before the foreclosure was final, she still owned the property and could do whatever she wanted. She didn't take action! In short she chose to freeze up and fail instead of hiring competent consul and fix her situation. This is a sad and unfortunate case. It illustrates to me that our systems are difficult and can be unforgiving. It illustrates that we need something extrajudicial that has compassion, for example outreach, advice, support. What it is not is immoral. Following the rules is not immoral, nobody lied, cheated, etc. The existing rules leave enormous amounts of time and leeway to correct mistakes and fix things. The plaintiff had to spend $100,000 on court fees to push this eviction. That's not a simple thing so there was lots of time and opportunity to reverse this. And it's economically a lot of effort wasted if she would have instead just paid her taxes. 90% of the people reading this are not as well off as the "victim" was - they don't own their house free and clear with a bunch of equity. Well, even if you do someday, guess what? you still have to pay your taxes.