Sometimes, what comes as a dream leaves as a nightmare.

Take that house. Geez, you think, if I just had that, I'd be happy. My own little piece of the pie. What else could I want?

How about a second piece of that pie? The first was so good financially that the next would have to be better.

Pretty soon, you're thinking the whole pie would be the best of all possible worlds.

Then comes the ruptured appendix.

Right now, there are more than a few Southwest County residents in the financial emergency room.

Their plight became apparent late last year when they began receiving notices that they were in default on their mortgages. The sweet cream of success quickly soured on their stomachs.

And it all began with such promise. Here they were, hard-working folks with fast-growing equity in a hot real estate market.

All they needed were financial savants to guide them along the golden path to wealth. As most people know, there is no shortage of people who know how best to invest your money.

That's where the defendants in a lawsuit filed last month come in.

Hendrix Montecastro, Maurice McLeod and James Duncan, all of Murrieta, apparently knew just what to do with their investors' money.

Unfortunately, according to the plaintiffs in the suit, their plan seems not to have included actually following through on the pie-in-the-sky real-estate investment scheme they were promoting.

This, according to the lawsuit, is how it worked: You supply the money to buy a house at inflated value. The surplus money goes into another investment which will be used to make some portion of the mortgage payment to which you have obligated yourself.

No cash? How about that equity or a credit card?

And, for those of you serious about wealth - real mattress-busting bucks --ñ why not buy four or five at the same time? Don't worry about qualifying. They'll take care of that. Just sign the form, Bucko. They'll fill in the tedious details.

Before you know it, they'll have you on Easy Street. Or, as it turns out in this case, just out on the street.

Thing is, the fallout from all this will affect more than the defendants and plaintiffs.

There are the renters who will have to abandon their homes before they are auctioned. There are the neighbors who will be treated to the sight of several vacant houses in the same neighborhoods.

Oh yeah, and don't forget about anyone who wants to sell a house, the value of which likely will be reduced by the glut of perhaps more than 100 foreclosure properties.

It would appear no one is without blame: Not the alleged perpetrators; not investors blinded by the promise of wealth to what must have been compelling evidence that something wasn't quite right; not the financial brokerages pushing dubious loans; not real-estate agents who should know that high-ball offers on houses languishing on the market are suspect; and not the appraisers who judged the prices to be justified.

Even some of the renters have demonstrated the baser part of our nature by deciding that because they will have to move before their lease is up they no longer will pay the rent to their landlord.

To quote Charles Crumb: This is all perfectly … delightful to be sure.

- Phil Strickland of Temecula is a regular columnist for The Californian. E-mail: philipestrickland@yahoo.com.