Foreclosure and Loan Modification Blog

When you have trouble with your mortgage, it's important to start thinking about how you're going to get out of trouble as quickly as possible. The sooner you can understand the issues affecting you and what the potential solutions are, the sooner you can work toward getting what you want, which is avoiding foreclosure and getting back on good terms with your lender.

While it can take years from the time you stop paying your mortgage until until you lose your home in foreclosure, spending that time dilly dallying, lollygagging, or failing to plan is a mistake. You're eventually going to lose your house, so use the time you have to your advantage by saving money, educating yourself, and making a strategy.

This may seem like common sense, and it is, but some homeowners are so overwhelmed by the stress of potentially losing their home that they freeze up and don't do anything. Playing dead is not an effective strategy. Pretending that you didn't get the bank's notices does not make you immune to their consequences. There are productive things to do.

If you don't understand the language around loan modifications, you will be hopelessly lost and could end up not getting the result you desire. And the consequence of not getting a mortgage loan modification for many homeowners is foreclosure. So if you want to modify your home loan, take a little time to familiarize yourself with some of the language related to it. It gives you the best chance to get the result you want.

If you guessed that people experiencing foreclosure or the threat of it have a higher incidence of physical and mental health issues including suicide and trips to the emergency room, you guessed right. That's no surprise given the stress of potentially losing your largest investment, moving your family, and having your credit negatively affected. However, you may not have guessed that having an illness is the reason some people go into foreclosure in the first place.

A 2014 study shows that people who had a chronic health condition that worsened as they aged were twice as likely to default on their mortgage and more than two-and-a-half times as likely to fall into foreclosure than people with a chronic condition that did not get worse over time.

The study found that people who got sicker were more likely to lose their job, their income, and health insurance, which made foreclosure more likely. Most people can't make their mortgage payment for long if they don't have a job, no matter the reason for losing it.

And people with a chronic condition who didn't lose their jobs were still at increased risk of defaulting on their mortgage loan. It's thought this is caused by the high medical costs accrued when treating a chronic condition.

No matter what you think the solution is or isn't, the reality is inescapable: healthcare is expensive, and it can cause you to go into foreclosure. It's something that's already happened to many people, and will happen to plenty more.

Claiming it is the most common sense and profitable solution to the ongoing foreclosure crisis, WTF Bank has announced the creation of an innovative loan modification program that actually increases the amount of principal owed by homeowners facing foreclosure.

According to WTF Bank's CEO, Shyster McShyster, the Principal Residential Increase Modification Program, or PRIMP, offers underwater and distressed homeowners a solution for getting even deeper underwater and more distressed.

Under the terms of PRIMP, homeowners who owe more on their mortgage loan than the home is worth and can't afford their monthly payments will have up to $125,000 added to their principal balance, making the payment even more unaffordable.

Difficult life events are all the more difficult when there's uncertainty that goes along with them. The worrying, waiting, and wondering about how things will work out makes it even harder to handle. That's especially true of a hardship that seven million Americans have experienced in recent years: foreclosure.

Everyone knows that if you stop paying your mortgage, your house will eventually be sold at auction or repossessed by the bank. What most people don't know is exactly how the process will unfold over what period of time, and how to determine if they can afford to keep their home and avoid foreclosure.

The foreclosure time line differs according to the laws in your state. There are free resources on this site that can help you understand them, including the differences between judicial and nonjudicial foreclosure. You need to be aware of that information if you've defaulted on your mortgage loan.

But the purpose of this post is to help you determine if you can afford to keep your home. Here's how:

When you need to hire an attorney, it usually means that something has gone wrong. Unless you're incorporating your dream business, the reason probably isn't good. It could be that you've been accused of a criminal or civil charge, are accusing someone else, or are trying to protect a valuable investment. Whatever the case, hiring an attorney is a necessity for making the best of the situation you're in.

A good lawyer with high ethical standards and plenty of relevant experience can increase your odds of getting the results you want. As you might guess, not all lawyers are good. Some of them are dishonest, substance abusers, or just plain jerks who are not a good fit for your and your needs.

The following are some common things attorneys do and don't do that make their clients hate them:

There is a wild beast lurking outside the door of many homes in America. Its name is foreclosure. For some homeowners it's not the first time they have encountered it. It came snarling and threatening to take their home from them once before, and they were able to drive it off with a loan modification.

Now the beast is back at the door, as dangerous and close as ever, and homeowners are wondering if a loan modification could be used to defeat it again.

Fortunately for distressed homeowners, loan modifications are not strictly one-time use. Having saved your home from foreclosure with a modification once does not automatically disqualify you from getting another.

It wasn't that long ago that everyone was talking about foreclosure and people were losing their homes in numbers that hadn't been seen since the Great Depression. At one point one out of every 248 households in the country had received a foreclosure notice.

Right now though, in 2016, you don't hear all that much about foreclosure. There are some good reasons for that. It's not as big of a problem as it used to be, home values have risen significantly, unemployment is down, and the Great Recession is technically over.

It's good that things have improved so much from where they were, but there's still a long ways to go before we can say these problems are behind us. Not all of the country's wounds have completely healed from the recession, and those that have left scars.

A loan modification is the only thing that keeps the homeowners who apply for it from losing their home to foreclosure. It permanently lowers their monthly payment to an affordable portion of their income and enables them and their family to continue living in the home that they know and love.

So, given the work it takes to apply for a loan modification, the cost of hiring an attorney, and the prospect of foreclosure, you'd think that no one who has been approved for one would fail to follow the simple instructions for finalizing the agreement. But it happens all the time, and it prevents or delays the final approval of a modification.

If you're at risk of foreclosure, a loan modification is your best bet for keeping your home. It allows you to reinstate your loan with a lower payment and keep your property. That's a wonderful thing. The process of getting a loan modification, however, is frustrating and stressful for many homeowners who struggle to understand and complete their applications, then have it denied while the threat of losing their home looms.

What is a Loan Modification?

A loan modification is a permanent change to one or more of the terms of a mortgage loan such as the interest rate, length of the loan, and principal. They have existed for a long time, but have only recently been needed for millions of homeowners.

When the country was hit with the worst recession since the great depression and was hemorrhaging jobs, millions of homeowners became unable to pay their mortgages, and foreclosures started in unprecedented numbers.