Posted by kevin on October 30, 2010 under Foreclosure Blog | 
You are behind on your mortgage. You call your lender or, more probably, your servicer and ask for a forbearance or a modification. You get bounced around on the telephone, no one calls back, and then finally after about a month you speak with a real person. You are sent modification papers. You fill them out, send them in. Nothing happens. You call again. In the meanwhile, you get a notice to foreclose followed by a foreclosure complaint. After a month or two of calling the servicer, you get someone on the phone who is responsive. She tells you that they lost or did not get your papers, and you have to send in a new set with updated information.
So, you start the process again. You do not think that you need to get a lawyer to answer the complaint because you are working with the lender. Moreover, every letter they send to you tells you that the lender is there to help. After another month or two, you are put on a trial modification. You make the payments for 3 months. You tell yourself that everything is all right. Then, out of nowhere, you get papers in the mail from the lender’s lawyers saying that they have entered final judgment by default. The double whammy comes two weeks later when you get a letter saying that your permanent modification has been denied.
Read more of this article »
Posted by kevin on October 11, 2010 under Foreclosure Blog |
You are behind on your mortgage 6 months. Your monthly payment, including taxes and insurance, is $3,000 per month. Your lender has filed a foreclosure complaint. What to do? Can filing bankruptcy help? The answer, like most answers involving legal issues, is that it depends. First of all, the filing of any bankruptcy acts as an automatic stay on most efforts to collect a debt including foreclosure. So, if you are facing a sheriff’s sale, the automatic stay will halt that sale. But, for how long?
In a Chapter 7, the stay lasts until the Trustee abandons the property, a creditor obtains relief from the automatic stay from the court, or the earlier of the time that the case is closed or a discharge is granted or denied. A trustee will usually abandon property if he or she determines that there is no equity in the property. That means that the mortgage is greater than the value of the property. This will happen about the time of the first meeting of creditors which occurs about 4-6 weeks after the filing. The trustee sends out a notice of abandonment. If no one objects , then the abandonment is processed by the clerk and notice is sent out to creditors. The whole process takes about 8 weeks and the foreclosure marches on.
Read more of this article »
Posted by kevin on October 5, 2010 under Foreclosure Blog |
I have spent the last 6 months or so in court handling about 20 foreclosure cases. I want to share with you what I am seeing. But first a little background. The concepts that we use at FIGHTFORECLOSURENJ.COM come out of a series of bankruptcy court and state court decisions from outside of New Jersey. The first cases came out of the bankruptcy courts in Ohio. Then, Florida, Massachusetts, California and Missouri. New Jersey was slow to catch on
In New Jersey, foreclosures are handled in the Superior Court, Chancery Division. There is usually only one chancery judge per county- so the same judge hears all foreclosure cases. In 2008 and the 2009, the chancery judges were of the mindset that if you borrowed the money and did not pay it back, you were guilty. Concepts like predatory lending and the right to sue (called “standing”) were mere distractions. So, the first thing that borrowers’ lawyers had to do was overcome a mindset. It was not easy.
Read more of this article »
