Home deals

I always thought it would be a good deal to buy a house that's foreclosed on, because usually they are a lot cheaper. But I've learned they are also a ton of work most of the time. When we were looking at houses in Idaho a few years ago we saw a few that people had obviously been angry about having to leave. One had holes punched in walls and the new carpet was trashed. And I remember seeing a news article about foreclosed houses that showed houses that had been completely stripped of appliances, cabinets wrecked, mirrors broken, etc. When my family moved their house down here 10 years ago they found out that a previous owner had filled in a pond that had been in the back yard. They hadn't bothered digging up the pond filters or removing any of it, just filled it in with boulders, making the backyard pretty much impossible to do anything with. So I've decided that maybe getting a foreclosed house isn't such a good deal if you have a ton of stuff to fix up to make it live-able.