Elin Bullmann

She used to surf 15th Street off Del Mar, worked for the old Phillips Ramsey and Advanced Marketing Services, married Ken Bullmann, a manufacturer’s rep, and had kids. Just a few years ago, when the world was a different place, they realized they wouldn’t have enough to put them through college and retire. So Elin and Ken Bullmann decided to invest in real estate, bought four houses at the top of the market with adjustable rate mortgages. Things were fine until the economy turned and they lost their renters as the higher mortgage payments kicked in.

They couldn’t rent the houses and couldn’t make their mortgage payments.

“This is the first time I’d gone through any major crisis like this,” she says. It hit me like a semi-truck. I was a zombie. I couldn’t sleep. You just walk through life in a daze, and you still have to take care of your life and your kids. Foreclosure takes such a hard hit. You’re confused, lost, embarrassed, shattered emotionally, you’re arguing, or you’re silent, even worse.

“I do go into this quite a bit with a licensed professional counselor, Bob Grant. I give away this book, ‘Couples In Crisis,’ for free inside of my ebook. If you can just hang on each day and try these things to get out of this mess and stay together, you’re going to be better off to rebuild.”

What she learned along the way fits neatly into a 185-page book called “How to Survive Foreclosure Or Avoid It Altogether,” available for instant downloading for $29.99 at surviveyourforeclosure.com.

The daughter of ex-Point Lomans Bill and Phyllis Munster, Bullmann, 40, has published her ebook almost in time to help some of the owners of 3,083 homes that went into default in San Diego County in June alone, with most of those homes representing two owners, wife and husband. That’s almost double the monthly default rate of one year ago.

But “How to Survive Foreclosure Or Avoid It Altogether” may be too late for others, like many of the owners of 1,838 other homes that went into foreclosure in June, up 180 percent from June 2007’s foreclosures, according to DataQuick Information Systems in La Jolla. Since 1999 and through most of 2006, San Diego hadn’t experienced more than a couple hundred foreclosures per month, usually far fewer than that. Statewide, Dataquick reports 121,341 notices of default filed in the second quarter, up about 7 percent from the first quarter and up 126 percent from 2007’s second quarter.

While most of the foreclosures are occurring in poorer neighborhoods, not all the homes being foreclosed in low-income locales belonged to the poor. The owners of rental properties are investors, middle or upper-income folks who are finding themselves suddenly poor, while thousands of owners of expensive homes are defaulting on loans, too.

In Bullmann’s case, one of her properties went into foreclosure — despite being in the process of a work-out with the bank — because her lender was so over-worked and disorganized, the lender lost her files. She was able to avoid foreclosure on the other properties and work out new deals with her lenders. She took good notes and dived into further research to create her book.

“When people enter this nightmare they first go to the Internet, type in some key words and get inundated. Some of the offers you’ll see are scams, some are legitimate. Most resources, articles in the paper or whatever, are only opinions in one area and may leave people unprotected in all those other areas. Short-selling, forbearance or even bankruptcy, a lot of people don’t understand these options. I talked with all the experts in all the areas foreclosure will affect your life: legal, tax, credit, financial, even personally obviously. I spent a year working closely with the brightest experts.

“What is the best point to stop making payments? Usually you don’t think like that, You think, ‘We just have to make these payments. The ebook is written from the standpoint of how to cut your losses or avoid them all together.”