The week the House was debating the judicial mortgage modification, lawyers on the other side of three of my cases volunteered their openess to a modification of the mortgage in question. Unheard of!
Prior to this point, I had seen only one client who made any headway with a voluntary loan modification, and it eventually crashed when the lender imposed impossible and expensive conditions regarding the junior liens.
All of a sudden, the prospect that a judge might be able to approve a loan modification within the statutory guidelines seemed to have changed the lender’s world view.
Now I know that it may be just the continually worsening housing market that influenced the lenders in my cases. But it seems to me symbolic of the benefit that leveling the playing field by allowing loan modification in Chapter 13 provides.
My mental image of the current loan mod alignment is that of a playground teter-toter where there is an adult on one end (the bank) and a five year old on the other (the borrower). Not much parity. Put a bankruptcy judge on the five year old’s end, and the borrower and the lender can play (or negotiate) effectively.
How long before the doubters in the U.S. Senate see this as a priority? How many more houses lost to families before some imaginative thinking and real leadership emerges?
Is that what I have to do to get a loan mod, go through bankruptcy?? For 8 months I have been trying to get a loan mod and Wells Fargo just keeps putting it off. I have a company that is supposedly doing it but they just get mad when I contact them.