To Find Skilled Workers
of Any Trade Just Click
On Any Category To The Left

Construction Source Network

| | | | | | |

To Find Skilled Workers
of Any Trade Just Click
On Any Category To The Left

Finding somebody good to work on your home or business!!!

Mortgage lenders pursue homeowners even after foreclosure


By Les Christie, staff writer , On Wednesday February 3, 2010, 3:21 pm
As terrible as it is to lose your house to foreclosure, at least it's a relief to put your biggest financial headache behind you, right?

Wrong!!

Former homeowners may still be on the hook if there's a difference between what they owed on their mortgage and what the bank could sell it for at auction. And these "deficiency judgments" are ticking time bombs that can explode years after borrowers lose their homes.

It can even happen to people who got their bank to approve them selling their home for less than it is worth.

Vanessa Corey, for example, short sold her Fredericksburg, Va., home in April 2008. She and her husband built the house in 2004, but setbacks, both personal (divorce) and professional (housing bust), made it impossible for the real estate agent to keep her home. So she negotiated the short sale and thought that was the end of it.

"My understanding was that the deficiency was negotiated away," she said. "Then, last November, I got a letter from a lawyer telling me I owed my lender $65,000. I had to declare bankruptcy. There was no way I could pay it."

Many homeowners are now in the same boat. And not just those who took out bigger loans than they could afford or who did so called "liar loans" where they didn't have to verify their income.

Because of falling home prices, borrowers who always paid their mortgage but who have run into unforeseen circumstances -- like unemployment or a job transfer -- can no longer sell their homes for what they owe. As a result, they are being forced to short sell or foreclose and are getting caught up in deficiency judgments.

"After the banks foreclose, it's very common now to have large deficiencies with houses not worth the balances owed," said Don Lampe, a North Carolina real estate attorney.

Lenders mostly declined comment. Although Corey's lender, BB&T did indicate it was pursuing more deficiency judgments.

"They follow the rise and fall of foreclosures," said the spokeswoman, who would not discuss Corey's account.

Can they come after you?

Whether banks can and will pursue deficiency judgments depends on many factors, including what state the borrower lives in and whether there's a second mortgage or other liens. But if borrowers ignore the possibility of deficiencies, it could haunt them.

"Once they have a judgment, they can pursue you anywhere," said Richard Zaretsky, a board-certified real estate attorney in West Palm Beach, Fla. "They can ask for financial records, have your wages garnished and, if you fail to respond, a judge can put you in jail."

In the case of foreclosure, lenders can pursue deficiencies in more than 30 states, including Florida, New York and Texas, according to the U.S. Foreclosure Network, an organization of mortgage law firms.

Some states, such as California, are "non-recourse" and don't allow deficiency judgments. But, even there, if the original loan was refinanced, some or all of it may be subject to claims.

Deficiency judgments on short sales and deeds-in-lieu can happen in many more places. In these cases, extinguishing the debt is often a matter of negotiating with the bank.

But even when lenders are willing, many borrowers may not be aware that they have to ask for release. So, if you are pursuing a short sale, be sure your attorney asks the bank to release you from any further obligation.

"People shouldn't have a false sense of security that a deficiency judgment may not be later sought," Zaretsky said.

He expects many will be filed over the next few years, based on the fact that banks have sold many of these accounts to collection agencies and other third parties, at discount.

"The parties who bought those notes wouldn't have paid money for them unless they had the intention of acting," Zaretsky said.

Ticking time bomb

What can be scary is that the judgments don't have to be obtained immediately. Lenders or collection agencies may wait until debtors have recovered financially before they swoop in. In Florida, the bank can wait up to five years to file. Once the court grants a judgment, the lender has 20 years there to collect, with interest.

It doesn't have to be a large amount of debt for a lender or collection agency to come after borrowers. Richard Varno and his wife short sold their Nashville home back in 2004 after he lost his job.

It wasn't until 2008, when the second lien holder asked him for $25,000, that he realized he still was liable.

"I told them, 'Hey, you guys released the title,'" he said. "As far as I know, I'm off the hook."

He wasn't. Releasing title does not necessarily end the debt. It's complicated because of variations in state law, but, generally, a mortgage has two parts: a pledge of collateral, represented by the home, and a promise to pay off the loan.

Lenders may release property liens in order to facilitate short sales without releasing borrowers from their obligations to pay under the promissory notes. The secured debt can convert to an unsecured one after the sale.

Zaretsky had one client who was so relieved to have arranged a short sale that he signed every paper his real estate agent shoved at him, even a confession that clearly stated he still owed the debt.

"He had no idea what he was doing," said Zaretsky. "All the lender had to do was go to court to convert the confession into a deficiency judgment."

Lenders are also very inconsistent. One of Zaretsky's short-sale clients was ready, willing and able to pay, but the bank did not even ask; another lender always reserves the right to pursue the deficiency.

Strategic defaults

Sometimes lenders go after borrowers walking away from their homes if they have other assets, according to Florida real estate attorney Larry Tolchinsky.

"Banks are pulling credit reports to see if it's a strategic default," he said. "If you're behind on all your other payments, you're okay. But if you're not, they'll come after you."

If borrowers have any doubts about their risks, they should seek legal advice. Or, at least, call non-profit organizations such as NeighborWorks for advice. According to Doug Robinson, a NeighborWorks spokesman, its counselors always try to negotiate away deficiencies when they facilitate short sales or deeds-in-lieu.

"We don't favor any short-sale contracts that leave any deficiency that can be pursued," he said.

Robinson himself knows what can happen. He paid off a deficiency after his own New Jersey house went through foreclosure 11 years ago.

Who’s Left? A Few Ultra-rich and Us, the Tapped-out Masses

J. Speer-Williams
Infowars.com
February 4, 2010

About to lose your home? Have you lost your home? Can you make the interest payments on your credit cards? Can you afford to maintain your car, your family’s incidental needs, your children’s health, or even buy enough food, gasoline or heating fuel?

Even junior plutocrat Warren Buffett said America will become a nation of sharecroppers.

How did such a sad state of affairs come about in our country, once the most affluent in the history of the world?

We have been massively betrayed by our national “leaders.”

And as if that was not bad enough our high level national leaders are appallingly ignorant of the basics in economics and finance, in addition to being traitors to their oaths of office, and to the American people.

Our elected politicians and appointed bureaucrats in Washington have become no more than highly paid, but ugly and atrocious actors, pretending to represent the American people.

But the American people be damned! It’s the International Monetary/Banking Cartel our fraudulent leaders represent.

Giving trillions of dollars to the ultra rich, while increasing taxes on our ever diminishing affluent, then exporting jobs and creating inflation, until all of us are tapped-out, has long been the standard operating procedure in Washington.

Since the inception of the Banking Cartel’s Federal Reserve System, in 1913, our courts, congresses and presidents have come under lock-down to a relatively small, but powerful group of foreign plutocrats; but, former President Bill Clinton worked overtime for this crime syndicate.

With the backing of the stealthy Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, and a compliant republican controlled congress, Clinton signed on to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), both of which essentially destroyed our ability to be a self-sufficient nation, and caused a tremendous exodus of jobs out of the US.

Ross Perot, forced out of the presidential race of 1996, warned us about the dangers of both GATT and NAFTA, but the International Banking Cartel wanted both Trojan horse “trade” agreements forced on America, in order to eliminate her as a beacon of hope and light in a dark world. In the Cartel’s One World Order there is to be parity amongst all nations – all equally poor.

Among Clinton’s worse crimes against humanity, however, were his repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, and the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act .

From the time of these sweeping deregulations of the private banking fraternity until 2002, the once illegal practice of packaging and trading in the toxic paper known as derivatives had reached monstrous proportions of about $102 trillion, enough to destroy the real basic economies of the entire world.

But by September of 2008, the once illegal practice of trading in derivatives had reached $530 trillion to 1.5 quadrillion dollars, amounts and figures well beyond human comprehension.

This black hole of derivatives is now about ten to thirty times the gross domestic products of the whole world, meaning it’s about ten to thirty times what is needed to throw all societies of Earth into a neo-feudalism.

Derivatives, sometimes called Asset Backed Securities are nothing more than financial contracts that DERIVE their falsely perceived value from other weak, underlying securities, mortgages, or other financial instruments.

There was so much blatant fraud from brokerage houses and investment bankers, for so long, it was virtually impossible that the financial kingpins, and US government regulators of the financial services industry, not to have known how the world-wide packaging, grading and trading in derivatives would eventually crash national economies.

But even so, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, not only gave his stamp of approval to the derivatives scam, he constantly campaigned in congress for legislation that would permit the international and mega-scaled trading of derivatives.

Alan Greenspan, Bill Clinton, and Clinton’s Secretaries of Treasury – Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers – should all be indicted and held accountable for their crimes against humanity, as their pernicious derivatives have caused so much insidious harm in thousands of obvious and subtle ways.

But instead, Clinton is portrayed by the Cartel’s corporate media as a centrist or New Democrat of Moderation, rather than the criminal Cartel puppet he was and still is.

Greenspan, the more obviously embedded alien agent of the dark, is today treated as a National Treasure, and grand old man of finance.

Robert Edward Rubin went back to Wall Street, from where he came, to further the Banking Cartel’s agenda in America.

After Lawrence Henry Summers committed his crimes in the Clinton administration, he has been appointed by President Obama to be on his White House economic staff.

Greenspan, Rubin, Summers, Clinton, and many others all claim ignorance in causing the greatest financial crises in recorded history.

But to now have Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner try to fill up, or combat in any way, this international black hole of funny money, with real debt dollars of bailout and “stimulus” packages, all paid for by tax-paying Americans is not only insane to its extreme, it is criminally on a scale never known to mankind.

And still to this very day, there have been no real regulations from our congress, or our financial regulators, or even serious presidential proposals made to curb the criminal excesses the Banking Cartel’s Wall Street banks or their Federal Reserve System.

Thank you very much Messrs. Clinton, Bush and Obama, you have all allowed the dark financial oligarchs of the world to continue to privatize their unethical, dirty profits; but are socializing their loses, thus starving to death about a billion people, while making peasants of the rest of us in the process.

Even junior plutocrat Warren Buffet said America will become a nation of sharecroppers, one he helped to make.

And according to estimates of the National Law Center on Homeless and Poverty, on any given night, between 700,000 and about two million Americans are without beds on which to sleep.

This controlled demolition of the world’s economy has been purposely confused by the International Monetary/Banking Cartel’s corporate media with their “word play” of avoiding the pejorative term “derivatives,” with their repeated use of various red herrings: Swaps, credit default swaps, futures, mortgage backed securities, hedge funds, options, forward contracts, warrants, or assets are all used to mislead and to confuse the American public, as the word “derivative” is incriminating.

But then again, practically everything our national leaders do is incriminating, as there is a profound difference between what they say, what they do, and what the American people need and want.

f

u

pl

Advertise Today !!