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Home Loan News

U.S. Rep. Bill Delahunt is Co-sponsoring Bill to Give Bankruptcy Judges the Right to Modify Mortgages

by Moe Bedard

U.S. Rep. Bill Delahunt  is upset with uncooperative lenders and mortgage servicers and says he is co-sponsoring a bill to give bankruptcy judges the right modify mortgages for homeowners.

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N.Y. regulator urges more support for homeowners

by Moe Bedard

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. Treasury Department plan to stabilize banks is a positive step, but the federal government must do more to support individual homeowners, New York Superintendent of Banks Richard Neiman said on Thursday.

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FDIC Chairwoman Says Loan Modification Plan Being Developed

by Moe Bedard

Sheila Bair, Chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Corporation (FDIC) is leading the loan modification charge in Washington and is gaining increasing support from Congress in her efforts.

Bair said in prepared remarks delivered before the Senate Banking Committee that the FDIC is working with the Bush administration to create a loan guarantee program that would serve as [...]

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Foreclosure Fighter McCain Says, “Buy Home Loans From Banks and Re-negotiate the Terms to Keep Families in Their Homes.”

by Moe Bedard

In contrast to Barack Obama’s own homeownership plan, John McCain has suggested a plan to involves more direct federal ownership of distressed mortgage assets. McCain’s plan, entitled the McCain American Homeownership Resurgence Plan, seeks to utilize the recently granted Treasury Secretary authority to use federal funds to help adjust mortgage terms for homeowners.
Simply put, the [...]

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Foreclosure Fighter Obama Says, “Allow Bankruptcy Court Judges to Modify Mortgage Payments”

by Moe Bedard

Turn on the TV today, and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll hear the line, “and I approve this message.” 
Yes, we’re in the heat of one of the most competitive Presidential campaigns in modern history, with more advertising spend than any previous election. While it is possible to gleam information from these ads, as well [...]

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Unexpected foreclosure help causing unexpected headaches

by Moe Bedard

Local officials are getting their first whiff of a direct benefit from the federal bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – and getting a little lightheaded.
Congress buried about $4 billion in the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 specifically to assist state and local governments in addressing problems with abandoned or foreclosed homes. [...]

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Developers use new laws to stave off foreclosure

by Moe Bedard

As residential and commercial real-estate markets falter, developers are increasingly turning to bankruptcy to stave off foreclosure on their troubled properties.
In the past, developers often filed for bankruptcy for the entire company, tying up all properties owned by their companies.
Changes to tax law and the U.S. Bankruptcy Code in the past decade enable developers to [...]

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FDIC to Sign Major Lease in Orange County

by Moe Bedard

The Federal Deposit Corporation (FDIC) has a job to do and this job may be the biggest clean up effort by any government or non-government agency ever in the history of our country and quite possibly the world.
Their job is to clean up the toxic mortgages and assets left by failed banking institutions ceased by the the [...]

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HUD Chief Questions McCain’s Bold Mortgage Plan

by Moe Bedard

“The housing crisis is the fault of predatory lenders, irresponsible buyers and careless Wall Street investors. I’m particularly amazed that people (on Wall Street) who had all these sophisticated models and were trained to analyze all this stuff bought it and distributed these loans around the world,” said HUD chief, Steve Preston, in a town hall [...]

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Key to the Crisis: It’s the Housing Market, Stupid

by Moe Bedard

“It’s the housing market, stupid.” That’s what an increasing number of policymakers and economists are saying as they push for widespread mortgage modifications as a way to address a root cause of the financial crisis. With more than 1.5 million houses in foreclosure (three times the normal rate), and about 3.5 million other homeowners behind [...]

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Why Wait? HSBC is Modifying Some Loans Before Clients Ask

by Moe Bedard

HSBC Finance Corp. wanted a better mortgage modification mousetrap.At the beginning of the year, nearly a fifth of the Mettawa, Ill., lender’s real estate loan portfolio had been modified after becoming delinquent. Freezes on initial rate resets for another roughly $1.3 billion of adjustable-rate mortgages were due to lapse this year. And a bottom in [...]

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Frank and Waters Call For FDIC’s Bair to Lead Country’s Loan Workout Efforts

by Moe Bedard

Barney Frank and Maxine Waters are calling on the FDIC’s Sheila Bair to take the loan workout reins and lead the charge to put the brakes on our nation’s foreclosure epidemic. In a letter to President Bush today, they wrote that they were “very impressed” with Bair’s recent work at the failed Indymac with her loan modification program [...]

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Broken Big Time

by Moe Bedard

She scrambled to renegotiate her loan and got trapped in a red-tape nightmare. The bank would not talk to her because she was not yet late on her payments.
“I ended up renting it out, my income was going down,” Ms. Formariz said. “I tried to hang on to it because I thought I was going [...]

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Trapped in American nightmare

by Moe Bedard

Here on LoanWorkout.org, I have been writing about the American Nightmare and the resistance homeowners recieve from their mortgage servicers when reaching out for help. And until this “serious issue” in our mortgage and housing crisis is addressed and these mortgage servicers are held accountable, Main Street and plumber Joe will continue to drown in [...]

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Home-Loan Help Lags, As More Borrowing Goes Bad

by Moe Bedard

 More must be done, say loan modification specialists IBD spoke with.
Overloaded With Loans
“Really, we have a national catastrophe,” said Moe Bedard, president of Loan Safe Solutions, a mortgage-auditing firm in Corona, Calif.
Hard-hit by foreclosures, California is seeing a rise in efforts to help homeowners, but also a backlog. In July, the latest month for which [...]

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Bair, “Permanently modify it, get people in a mortgage they can afford.”

by Moe Bedard

FoxBusiness – Let me begin with the FDIC Chair Sheila Bair who is featured on the cover of today’s Wall Street Journal criticizing the federal government’s plan for failing to address homeowners at risk of foreclosure. Her comments could not be better timed. Thankfully someone within the economic team is saying what certain members of [...]

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NJ Gov. Corzine Wants Foreclosure Mediation

by Moe Bedard

TRENTON (AP) ― Gov. Jon S. Corzine laid out a sweeping financial rescue plan for New Jersey on Thursday that includes immediate assistance for homeowners facing foreclosure, tax breaks for businesses, and plans to create jobs by jump-starting highway and school construction projects.
Corzine, the one-time head of the global investment firm of Goldman Sachs and [...]

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Homeowners Ask: Hey, Washington, a Little Help?

by Moe Bedard

TIME Magazine – All told, some 6.5 million families will lose their homes to foreclosure in the next few years, according to the projections of financial firm Credit Suisse.
Even so, the troubled U.S. homeowner is not among the priorities of those in Washington who are dishing out rescue funds. The Treasury Department plans to spend [...]

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FDIC Simplifies Coverage Rules for Mortgage Servicing Accounts

by Moe Bedard

The FDIC Board of Directors today adopted an interim final rule, effective immediately, to simplify the deposit insurance rules for accounts held at FDIC-insured institutions by mortgage servicers.
Under the FDIC’s current rules, accounts maintained by a mortgage servicer comprised of principal and interest payments made by borrowers are insured based on the ownership interest of [...]

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Local foreclosure SOS being heard

by Moe Bedard

After she was laid off two years ago, Rosemarie Cino tried talking to her mortgage lender when she fell $8,000 behind on her mortgage despite her jobs walking dogs, cleaning swimming pools and driving for Federal Express.
“They didn’t even want to talk to me,” said the Islip resident, who has two dogs. “They were like, [...]

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Cook County Sheriff Takes Stand Against Predatory Renting

by Moe Bedard

In an op-ed piece in the Chicago Sun-Times explaining his decision, Sheriff Tom Dart said that “too many times,” his deputies have arrived at foreclosed properties to find tenants who have indeed paid their rent. But the property owner hadn’t paid the mortgage, leading banks to foreclose on the property.
LoanWorkout.org has covered the new scam [...]

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Mortgage servicers sucking loans dry?

by Moe Bedard

Mortgage industry milking homeowners before foreclosure, critics say
“I have had people in the [servicing] industry tell me that their best customer is the one who is always 30 days late,” said Howard Glaser, a former official at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the president of the Washington, D.C.-based Glaser Group, a [...]

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11 State AG’s Calling for Nation’s Largest Loan Modification Program

by Moe Bedard

In a move to follow in the footsteps of the recent Bank of America $8.4 billion predatory lending settlement, the State Foreclosure Prevention Working Group is adding pressure and much needed media attention on the mortgage servicing crisis.
In a letter signed by Iowa Attorney General Thomas Miller on behalf of the State Foreclosure Prevention [...]

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HUD to Fine Uncooperative Mortgage Servicers

by Moe Bedard

HUD will assess civil money penalties against uncooperative mortgage servicers for failure to engage in loss mitigation with struggling homeowners. The letter does not specify the damages a servicer would incur. However, this is a step in the right direction and I applaud HUD for making a move to hold servicers “somewhat” accountable.

MORTGAGEE LETTER 2008-27 

 

TO: ALL [...]

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Longest Foreclosure Battle in US History Continues for Ohio Man

by Moe Bedard

Supreme Court Denies Petition for Writ Of Certiorari of Couple Seeking Return of their Home taken under the Color of Law as the Trial Court lacked jurisdiction to Render Judgment as a Matter of Law.
Cleveland, OH, October 6, 2008- The US Supreme Court announced on October 6, 2008, that it denied the Davet’s Petition for [...]

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California’s Luxury Home Foreclosure Crisis Deepening

by Moe Bedard

Forbes magazine just came out with an article titled, “America’s Luxury Foreclosure Capitals” and California had a disturbing 24 of the top 25 troubled luxury foreclosure spots and nine of them were in Orange County (The OC) with the City of Laguna Niguel topping the list.
This sector of our foreclosure crisis will grow considerably in 2009. Especially [...]

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Struggling borrowers face brick wall on loan workouts

by Moe Bedard

Reductions in principal, on mortgages that now dwarf the home’s value, are nearly unheard of, even among the most willing firms. Just 2 percent of modifications — or less than 1 percent of all loan “workouts” — resulted in a reduction in principal, according to a monthly state survey of a dozen California lenders and [...]

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US mortgage modifications level off, but may rise

by Moe Bedard

Slower-than-expected growth in loan modifications may be tied to complex ownership of the loans that are collateral for bonds owned by investors with competing interests, analysts said.
Many bond contracts stipulate no more than 5 percent of a pool can be modified, forcing servicers to negotiate with investors to show a new loan leaves them better [...]

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Ohio woman, 90, attempts suicide after foreclosure

by Moe Bedard

A 90-year-old Ohio woman, facing eviction from the home she has lived in for 38 years, shot and wounded herself this week, becoming a grim symbol of the U.S. home mortgage crisis.
Addie Polk was found lying on the floor of her home with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to her shoulder when [...]

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Modifying some of those loans

by Moe Bedard

AS THE Bush administration and Congress try to untangle the fallout from the defeat of the Wall Street bailout, foreclosures continue to climb, financial companies fail, and the middle class economic squeeze worsens by the day.
One significant action doesn’t need congressional approval and can make a big difference. Effective and wide-scale loan modification programs by [...]

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Unforgiven? Mortgage modifications skyrocket—but not principal reductions

by Moe Bedard

Servicers tweaking loans, even though debt forgivenss more effective way of preventing defaults
Loan modifications for financially pressed homeowners have soared six-fold in the last year, though mortgage servicers are still making little use of the most effective approach to reducing borrowers’ delinquent payments.
Modifications rose to about 30,000 in August, from about 5,000 a year before, according [...]

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ANALYSIS OF SUBPRIME MORTGAGE SERVICING PERFORMANCE

by Moe Bedard

Nearly one year ago, the State Foreclosure Prevention Working Group met with the 20
largest servicers of subprime mortgage loans to discuss opportunities to prevent
unnecessary foreclosures. Over the past year, the State Working Group, composed of
state attorneys general and state banking regulators, has collected data monthly from 13
of these 20 servicers and published two reports on [...]

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US mortgage modifications leveled off in August

by Moe Bedard

NEW YORK, Oct 2 (Reuters) – U.S. mortgage servicing companies permanently eased terms on about 79,000 home loans in August, slightly less than in July, suggesting the practice aimed at preventing foreclosure may be leveling off, according to data published by an industry group on Thursday.
 
Servicing companies, which collect payments and distribute the money to [...]

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Citigroup will absorb Wachovia’s loans

by Moe Bedard

Wachovia announced this summer it would stop offering pick and pay loans, but that wasn’t soon enough for thousands of homeowners like Marie, who are already in those loans.
Citigroup did not return our calls on Monday seeking comment about what it will do with the existing loans and Wachovia said it was too early to [...]

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Bailout: Little help for homeowners

by Moe Bedard

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The $700 billion bailout legislation now under consideration by Congress calls for the Treasury Secretary to implement a plan to stem foreclosures by working with servicers to modify loans.
But many housing experts question whether the bill will help struggling homeowners refinance into more affordable mortgages. They stress that the economy won’t [...]

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Even with bailout, mortgage delinquencies will likely worsen

by Moe Bedard

The “proposal is positive for the housing market to the degree that it shores up the banks’ ability to lend and prevents banks from closing their doors, that is key to finding stability for the housing market,” says Susan Wachter, professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “But it [...]

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The “loan modifications,” Coakley said, would have kept homeowners in their homes under affordable, “sustainable” terms.

by Moe Bedard

Little more than a week ago, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley was in Washington, D.C., testifying before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee about the state’s prosecution of auction-rate securities fraud.
However, more interesting was written testimony Coakley submitted to the committee regarding the failure of the state’s attempt to get the mortgage industry to rearrange [...]

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Bailout includes no bankruptcy aid for homeowners

by Moe Bedard

The Wall Street rescue deal does not include a provision allowing judges to revise loans on primary residences.
LA TIMES WASHINGTON — As congressional negotiators labored over the giant financial bailout plan last week, business leaders saw little to applaud in more than a few of the ideas under discussion, including one that proposed changing the [...]

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Senator Clinton Speaks on Loan Modifications and Help for Homeowners

by Moe Bedard

Please Watch the CNN Money Video: Clinton – “The Time to be Decisive”

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What about my mortgage?

by Moe Bedard

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The Bush administration wants to help beleaguered financial institutions – and prevent the financial crisis from getting worse – by spending $700 billion to buy up troubled mortgage securities.
But many struggling homeowners are asking: “Where’s my bailout?”
Democratic lawmakers have taken up their battle and say they will include more help for [...]

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Lenders Offering Homeowners Little Aid, Congress Told

by Moe Bedard

The House Financial Services Committee is holding hearings this week into mortgage lenders’ efforts to help struggling homeowners avoid default. The testimony from one state official was less than encouraging.

“Based upon our experiences in Massachusetts, lenders, holders and servicers have not lived up to their very public promises of avoiding foreclosures by achieving loan modifications,” said Massachusetts [...]

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Who’s My Mortgage Lender this Week?

by Moe Bedard

Imagine you go to a Ford dealership, test drive a car, and then sign a contract to buy it. But as soon as the deal is done, they tell you you’re actually getting a Chevy, and the dealership across the street will be handling the details.
Or you go to a restaurant and order a steak, [...]

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Democrats Call for a Fannie & Freddie Foreclosure Freeze

by Moe Bedard

When I hear the word, freeze, in regards to the mortgage and housing crisis, I immediately think of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Batman and Robin as Mr. Freeze with his super duper freeze gun.
Freezing everything in sight!
Yes, sometimes I fantasize in my own little loan modification and foreclosure freeze world. Hell, you have to fantasize a [...]

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Bear Stearns and EMC Mortgage to Pay $28 Million to Settle FTC Charges of Unlawful Mortgage Servicing and Debt Collection Practices

by Moe Bedard

Attention American Homeowners: Do you think your servicer may be charging you fees illegally, abusing the debt collection laws or just plain scamming you? Guess what? They most likely are and if you do not do anything about it. You are what are called a helpless victim.
I am begging you to fight back and [...]

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Safe Tools to Help You Through the Foreclosure Process From Loan Safe

by Moe Bedard

By Moe Bedard

The foreclosure process moves fast and in order to make it through this unforgiving time frame, you need to have a plan. The best mindset for anyone in this situation is to hope for the best and plan for the worst because there are no guarantees of success when attempting to negotiate with [...]

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