Posts under ‘Uncategorized’

The Conyers/Turner/Lofgren amendment to allow modification of home mortgages in bankruptcy will reach the floor of the House perhaps as early as today.
You can use NACBA’s toll free phone number to find your Congressman and be automatically connected with the office.
Here’s how:
1. Phone toll free at: 877.354.4958
2. Put in your zip code
3. When you reach [...]

Mortgage Modification Bill Back on Track
Legislation to allow bankruptcy judges to rewrite the terms of mortgages is being considered again in Washington.  Senate House Financial Services Chairman, Barney Frank (D., Mass.), is planning on attached such a bill to a financial regulatory overhaul scheduled to be introduced later this year or early in 2010.  Such [...]

The flurry of advertisements on the TV promoting people who promise loan modifications suggests that modifications are available if you just know how to do it right.
My experiences suggest that it isn’t so.  If there is a theme I hear in talking with clients who’ve sought loan modifications is that they can never get through [...]

One of my clients actually was offered a loan modification, or rather a trial period in which he could send the lender money, after which they would consider offering him a modification.
I was to fax it to the lender after we had discussed the risks and rewards.  The offer, now signed by the client, had [...]

Nearly 3 million homeowners are eligible for the government sponsored loan modifications;  only 400,000 received a loan modification offer over the life of the  government program.
In the meantime, 1.5 million homeowners got a foreclosure notice in the first half of this year.
Lenders at the top of the list for percentage of eligible loans modified include [...]

National real estate columnist Kenneth Harney wrote about the decision to default on affordable  mortgage payments when the loan is larger than the value of the home.  Is default a viable strategy?
What grabbed me was not the ethical question, but the factoid that homes purchased in 2006 in Salinas are on average $214,000 underwater!  [...]

Modifications are down in the second quarter of this year, and foreclosures are on the rise, reports New York Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson in a piece entitled So Many Foreclosures, So Little Logic.
My experience in the San Francisco Bay Area is consistent with the theme that modification are few and the degree of change in [...]

I actually met a client yesterday who had negotiated the modification of her loan .  Interest rate reduced to 2% for 2 years; 4% for 2 years; and 6% thereafter.  Arrearages added to principal.
If that’s all you knew you might think that lenders were serious about making modification work.  The remaining fact is that the [...]

Does the Obama Administration read the New York Times?  Then perhaps today’s paper will point out that voluntary loan modification isn’t working. Papers lost, hours on hold, arbitrary denials, the litany goes on.  The Administration can’t tell us how many loans have been modified.
The mere existence of a “program” such as the Times shows in [...]

The Mercury News’ story on community resources in the South Bay for those facing foreclosure was wrapped in the tale of a woman worn out by two years of counseling those at risk of losing their homes.
Congress and, to some degree the press, has moved on from the foreclosure crisis, while the statistics report that [...]