Foreclosure Horror Stories [Banks show no mercy]

[Umm Muhammad]

Michael Snyder

During the last housing crash, the
big banks begged the federal government for help and they received it, but when
average Americans ask the big banks for help most of the time the banks show no
mercy whatsoever. If you fall behind on your mortgage payments, the big banks
have shown that they are willing to be absolutely ruthless. They will change
locks in the middle of the night, they will toss disabled veterans and families
with children out into the street in the middle of winter, and sometimes once
the foreclosure process has begun they will not even allow someone to come
forward and offer to pay off the loan if they think that they can make more
money by selling the home.

The big
banks will often string homeowners along for months or even years with loan
modification promises, only to drop the hammer on them at the most inopportune
time. Over the past several years there has been case after case where mortgage
documents have “disappeared”, where big banks have “manufactured” missing
documents out of thin air and there have even been cases where big banks have
tried to foreclose on homes that do not even have a mortgage. Once in a while,
the big banks get a small slap on the wrist, but nobody ever really gets into
much trouble for any of this. In fact, the big banks just continue to gain even
more market share and even more power. Hopefully when some of these foreclosure
horror stories start to become publicized more widely we will start to see some
real changes in the marketplace.

The following are 10 foreclosure horror stories that
will blow your mind…

#1 If you get
behind on your mortgage, your family might be tossed into the street at gunpoint
in the middle of the night… This week, Christine Frazer and her family were
thrown out of the Atlanta home they’d lived in for 18 years, at gunpoint in the
dead of night. They were not set upon by robbers, but by the Dekalb County
Sheriff’s department, which evicted the family at the request of Investors One
Corporation. As Steven Rosenfeld reported for AlterNet, it was the fourth
company to buy the family’s mortgage in eight months.

#2 Time after time we have seen authorities show
absolutely no mercy when conducting these evictions… It was bad enough when
62-year-old disabled veteran Ramsey Harris was evicted from a foreclosed house
on Jamaica Lane where the former owner had been letting him live. Then it
started to rain as all his worldly possessions sat in a heap by the side of the
road and Harris noticed some of his valuables were missing. “It was just ugly,”
Harris said Friday. “I was just broken-hearted. I couldn’t believe what was
happening to me. I ended up standing, watching all my life’s work go down the
tubes.”

#3 Sometimes financial
institutions will promise you a loan modification for many months and then turn
around and foreclose on you anyway… When the economy crashed and his business
slowed down, Wells Fargo offered to modify Steve Bailey’s loan to lower his
payments. After making a series of trial payments, Wells Fargo notified Steve
that his modification was on the way. A few days later he received a letter
stating that his modification had been denied. The Wells Fargo representative he
spoke with reassured him that they had made a mistake and that he should keep
making the payments, which he did for seven months. Steve then started to
receive foreclosure notices. Again, the bank representative assured him that the
notices had been sent in error. Then Steve checked his credit. Wells Fargo had
reported him delinquent on his mortgage for the last six months. The reduced
payments that Steve had agreed to pay for the previous months had been put into
a separate trust by Wells Fargo, and they had not gone towards his mortgage.
Steve took the case to court but lost despite mountains of evidence in his
favor. He lost his home and his business.

#4 Other homeowners have found themselves trapped in
loan modification hell for years… I am self-employed, have been all my life and
have owned a home for 30 years. When I started my Loan Modification process in
August of 09 I WAS NOT behind on any payments. I sent full documentation, over
150 pages, with the things they needed to verify my income. I am now 2 payments
behind and I am getting nowhere. They keep flipping me between Loss Mitigation
and Imminent Default, back and fourth month end month out. I made a habit of
calling every week, then every two weeks just to be sure all was moving forward.
From the middle of November I was told my file was with the underwriter and it
would only be 30-60 days. I began automatically updating my income verification,
verification that I still resided at the property and an updated 4506-T every
month. In the middle of April a rep finally told me I was not in the loan
modification process. In fact, that I had been denied on March 2. Keep in mind,
I’m talking to these people every 2 weeks. She did a financial interview and
sent me a new packet so that I could start all over, resubmitting all the
documentation yet again. She told me she was my Account Manager. I completed the
packet, called with a question (2 weeks later – over a week to receive the
packet and another few days to complete it and gather all my documents again)
and learned that my “Account Manager” was on maternity leave and I now didn’t
have an account manager. Also, I was told that I had received the incorrect
packet…it was the old version rather than the updated version. She asked me to
fax four or five pieces of information in the hopes it would, quote, “jump start
my file back into the process” and said she we send me another packet. That was
mid April. Here we sit, 2-1/2 months later, I have still not received anything
in writing about my rejection. And, though I’ve now had people tell me on three
separate occasions that I would receive a new packet, it has yet to show up on
my door step. I asked several times why my application was denied and the answer
I finally got last week was that it was because I was DELIQUENT in my payments.
Call me crazy but I thought that was the whole point??!! I almost hired a third
party but am so hesitant to take that step. Every time I get on the phone with
them it takes an hour out of my day and I am usually so upset I find it
difficult to work, so I just don’t call. I’m going to sit back and regroup and
decide what I need to do next.

#5
Sometimes a big bank will kick someone out of their home and then never actually
take possession of the house. As a result, many former homeowners now find
themselves stuck with thousands of dollars of unpaid bills. For example, a
recent CNN article told the story of Rose Nathan, a 37-year-old office manager…
Nathan lost her South Bend, Ind., home in January 2009, after working out a deal
with CitiMortgage to voluntarily walk away in a “deed in lieu of foreclosure.”
“On Christmas Eve, the bank called and told me a sheriff’s sale was coming and I
had to move out right away,” she said. “So that’s what I did — seven days after
New Year’s.” She sold her belongings and moved to Hawaii. Nearly two years
later, she received a property tax bill from the City of South Bend for $5,000.
The bank had never taken possession of the house. These unpaid taxes that she
didn’t even know about have absolutely destroyed Nathan’s finances… Meanwhile,
the unpaid debt has crushed Nathan’s credit score. The deed-in-lieu alone
lowered her score by 80 to 120 points, but the unpaid debt meant her credit kept
taking a hit. Eventually her credit card companies cut her off, even though she
said she was making her payments. Her auto loan now carries a 25% rate. Her car
insurance premiums have skyrocketed. She can only afford a one-bedroom apartment
where she lives with her three kids. And forget about buying another home.
“Nobody will give me a mortgage,” she said.

#6 Sometimes a big bank will decide to foreclose on you
even when you have been making all of your payments. Just check out what real
estate agent Mark Conca went through with one major bank… He decided to approach
his lender, Bank of America, to see if he’d qualify for a modification. After he
applied, many months passed and Conca heard nothing from the bank. Knowing
lenders had huge backups in modification requests, he remained patient. Conca,
41, continued to make the full payment on the mortgage for his Caldwell home, on
time, every month. But that’s not what Bank of America said when it sent Conca a
letter about its intent to foreclose. “I would have been better going to a loan
shark and borrowing all that money,” Conca said. “At least with the street
mafia, you know where you stand.”

#7 Sadly, the customer service at many of these large
financial institutions is almost non-existent. In fact, sometimes
representatives from these companies will literally tell you that they won’t
lift a finger to help you… After a car accident Kathryn Nava wound up on
disability and had trouble making her mortgage payments. She had a friend who
was willing to help her make her back payments, but that friend wanted to see a
payment history before giving her the money. Nava called her mortgage lender to
request that history—and was told it would cost her $50 per hour, and take 90
days to receive it. So she tried again, calling the president of the company.
She got a voicemail response that shocked her so much she recorded it and saved
it. “Let me enlighten you, Kathy. First of all, there’s nothing in your contract
with us says we owe you any history, now, next year, five years from now or the
next time…I’ve begun foreclosure today. I bet you’re sorry now that you made
that phone call. I don’t need to put up with your crap, OK?…Bottom line, I’m
doing nothing for you now.” Indeed, she did end up losing her home.


#8 Sometimes the big banks will
try to foreclose even when you paid cash for your house and you don’t even have
a mortgage… Charlie and Maria Cardoso are among the millions of Americans who
have experienced the misery and embarrassment that come with home foreclosure.
Just one problem: The Massachusetts couple paid for their future retirement home
in Spring Hill with cash in 2005, five years before agents for Bank of America
seized the house, removed belongings and changed the locks on the doors,
according to a lawsuit the couple have filed in federal court.


#9 Dealing with these big banks is
so incredibly frustrating that some homeowners have completely snapped. For
example, one very frustrated homeowner in Ohio decided to crash his SUV into his
own home… 30-year-old Steve Doak told deputies he was recently served with
foreclosure papers and wanted to destroy the house rather than turn it over to
the bank. The sheriff’s office says Doak drove the vehicle into fencing and then
into the rear of the house

#10
Another very frustrated homeowner literally bulldozed his own home… “The average
homeowner that can’t afford an attorney or can fight as long as we have, they
don’t stand a chance,” he said. Hoskins said he’d gotten a $170,000 offer from
someone to pay off the house, but the bank refused, saying they could get more
from selling it in foreclosure. Hoskins told News 5′s Courtis Fuller that he
issued the bank an ultimatum. “I’ll tear it down before I let you take it,”
Hoskins told them. And that’s exactly what Hoskins did.

Meanwhile, the big banks that are doing all of this
continue to receive billions of dollars in assistance from the federal
government. The following is from a recent Bloomberg article… When JPMorgan
Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon testifies in the U.S. House
today, he will present himself as a champion of free-market capitalism in
opposition to an overweening government. His position would be more convincing
if his bank weren’t such a beneficiary of corporate welfare.


To be precise, JPMorgan receives a
government subsidy worth about $14 billion a year, according to research
published by the International Monetary Fund and our own analysis of bank
balance sheets. The money helps the bank pay big salaries and bonuses. More
important, it distorts markets, fueling crises such as the recent
subprime-lending disaster and the sovereign-debt debacle that is now threatening
to destroy the euro and sink the global economy.

[Umm Muhammad]

Is it possible to
make every single
payment on time -
and still lose your
house to foreclosure?

It happens every
day of the week.

Here's how.

Video:

http://www.realecontv.com/page/22307.html