Upside Down Mortgage

Loss Mitigation Foreclosure

Question: News forecasts, be more specific on borrowers rights on foreclosures. Help us?

Who can we contact for help? Who can we trust with so many scams and identy theft everywhere? Should we get legal help as well as housing counseling? How do we get in contact with the loss mitigation dept. with the lender? Whats our government doing to help/protect us from foreclosures?

Answer: You can also try the Home Owners Preservation Foundation. They are a nonprofit organization that will help you negotiate a forebearance with you lender for free. They are at www.995hope.org.

Also, contact your local HUD office. There are a lot of local programs available.

Two other options you have: Deed in lieu, and reverse mortgages. Deed in lieu is where you basically surrender your deed to the mortgage company without them having to go through the legal battle. It saves them tons of legal costs, and it saves you from having a foreclosure. A reverse mortgage is where you sell you home back to the lender based on how much equity you have in the home. If you have been paying the mortgage on time for a long time, you will have a couple of months or years of time with no mortgage payments to get your finances in repair before the lender owns your home and you have to vacate the premises.

Finally check with local investors. There are always people out there who will buy your house from you for a profit. You can find them in your local newspaper under the real estate classifieds. They normally have ads that say "we buy houses". This may not always be profitable to you. It will remove the problem though, and save you from having a black foreclosure mark on your record for life. A lot of times you can walk away with some cash in your pocket too.

Whatever you do - you have to MOVE FAST and act now. A bank can foreclose in a very short amount of time. Once a house is foreclosed, then you have lost every claim to any money that you have put into that property (although in some states there is a redemption period in which you can still pay off the loan and get the property back).

US HomeSavers Loss Mitigation Foreclosure Prevention

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