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Loan Modification

California DRE Looking Into 1,3000 Loan Modification Scams

“These people were taking advantage of people at the end of their ropes,” said Davi, speaking at the O.C. Coastal Chapter of the Women’s Council of Realtors. “And they are so prevalent.”
Many scam artists see the issuance of a desist-and-refrain order as a cost of doing business, Davi said. Often, they’re able to reopen under [...]

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Wells Fargo Plays Kick the Can With Pick-A-Pay Mortgages

This isn’t Wells Fargo, this is Hells Fargo!

NEW YORK (Dow Jones)–Wells Fargo & Co.’s (WFC) strategy for modifying its billions in troubled Pick-A-Pay mortgages looks a lot like a game of kick-the-can-down-the-road.

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Nevada Loan Modification Company Approved List

Here is a list of Nevada firms still eligible to offer loan modifications. This was posted on the Nevada Division of Mortgage Lending’s Web site site and will continue to be updated. Illegal Loan Mod firms who were announced yesterday here are no longer authorized to conduct foreclosure prevention services and are given 10 days [...]

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Dennis Kucinich: ‘Hey, you took care of Wall. St. Why didn’t you take care of Main St?

Foreclosures are “hurting families, marriages and lives,” McCoy says.
Georgia leads the country in bank failures—a majority being small community banks. Westmoreland says that little banks are getting hit unfairly, with a widespread ripple effect.
Yet, there’s little indication at the moment that Congress will act anytime soon to stem more foreclosures. Kucinich acknowledged that with Congress [...]

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30 Nevada Loan Modification Companies Face Closure

Nearly 30 loan modifications companies will be shut down Tuesday for not following a new law.
The Nevada Division of Mortgage Lending is closing the companies because they failed to meet their obligations to get a minimum $75,000 surety bond. The bond is a provision meant to protect consumers who may have been hurt by the [...]

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Homeowners: “Hey Congress, Get Off Your A**” – PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION

If you are a homeowner and want to unite with other homeowners fighting to save their homes, please sign the petition below in order to help us help you.
Divided we fall and united we stand!
By Richard Zombeck, the members of LoanSafe.org & Huffington Post:
So, while the banks, servicers, and lenders are waiting for American tenacity to kick [...]

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Florida Regulators React to Loan Modification Complaints

With hundreds of Floridians filing complaints about troubles with their lenders over home mortgages, state and federal officials say they’re ramping up efforts to improve the process for borrowers who need a loan modification.
Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum’s office said it is spending $4 million over two years to fund free legal services to homeowners [...]

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FICO Says New Loan Modification Reporting Will Not Affect Credit Scores

Jasmine Bendon of Ventura says her FICO scores dropped from the mid-700s to the low-600s after her lender put her on a trial modification and reported it as a partial payment. On the plus side, the trial modification has cut her monthly payment by $1,300.
New reporting plan
Starting today, lenders have a new, more benign way [...]

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California Attorney General Brown’s Letter to Banks & Loan Servicers

The foreclosure crisis continues to plague California homeowners who are trapped in mortgages with exploding monthly payments. While the economy is beginning to improve, homeowners desperate to save their homes have seen little relief. And analysts predict that foreclosures will continue to worsen, particularly as Pay Option ARMs begin to recast.
Economists estimate that about one [...]

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Loan Modification Numbers are Fantasy Land

Mortgage expert and one-time Fannie Mae Chief Credit Officer Edward Pinto says a claim made by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner that 500,000 homeowners have entered the Obama administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) is ridiculous.
In fact, he says, the program is rapidly becoming: “I will pretend to modify your loan if you pretend that you [...]

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Hundreds of Florida Homeowners File Complaints Against Their Mortgage Servicers

The Attorney General’s Office has logged 452 complaints about Bank of America, Florida’s largest mortgage lender, concerning mortgages and loan modifications. With its acquisition of Countrywide Financial last year, Bank of America had almost 82,000 mortgage loans outstanding in Florida worth $15.3 billion in 2008, according to National Mortgage News.
Next largest is JP Morgan Chase, [...]

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Video: A Trip in Loan Modification Hell

Sometimes loan modifications can be a real pain, others believe that trying to get a loan modification is a form of hell on earth. This video shows you why they lose faxes constantly and who is really in charge of the banks.
Watch this video and decide for yourself.

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Unemployed and Trying to Save the American Dream

SPRINGDALE — Homeowners who lose their jobs and collect unemployment income now have a better chance to modify their mortgages, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
Until recently, unemployment income was not utilized when calculating a loan modification, leaving distressed homeowners with few options.
Because income is the basis for mortgage modification or loan qualification, unless a [...]

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Homeowner Told to Stop Making Payments by Mortgage Servicer

When MC lost his second job he had trouble affording his $3,000 mortgage payment. He called his mortgage holder, Flag Star Bank, asking for a break, but the bank told him there was nothing it could do for him unless he skipped payments and submitted a loan modification package.
Can you tell where this is going? [...]

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Government Wants School Children and Homeowners to Spot Scams

And it is one of the first places targeted in the homeowner education campaign launched on Monday by government agencies, local leaders and housing advocates to stop scammers preying on desperate borrowers nationwide.
Officials do not know how many scams have been perpetrated among millions of American families who have lost their homes or face foreclosure. [...]

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Man Fights Chase Mortgage After Wifes Death

Little said he mailed paperwork to JP Morgan Chase seeking a loan modification, but that the bank said he did not qualify. He will be three months behind on his payments in November.
Chase officials said they could not discuss Little’s case specifically because of privacy laws, but that the bank has sent him more papers [...]

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Nevada Loan Modification Companies Still Think it’s the Wild, Wild West

What if you had a home modification law that everyone ignored? In its 2009 legislative session the State of Nevada passed a law requiring loan modification companies to be licensed. The law, which recently took effect, not only required a license but the companies were also required to post a $75,000 surety bond. It seemed [...]

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Government Loan Modification Numbers Way Off

Mortgage expert and one-time Fannie Mae Chief Credit Officer Edward Pinto blasts the claim that 500,000 homeowners have entered into HAMP (Home Affordable Modification Program).
Based on comments being made by industry participants and program results to date, HAMP is rapidly becoming: I will pretend to modify your loan if you pretend that you will make [...]

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Lack of Good Lawyers Adding to the Foreclosure Crisis

Unlike similar legal fields such as bankruptcy, foreclosure is rarely a full-time practice and is often handled by real estate attorneys or legal aid services agencies. Still, more than 3 million property foreclosures were filed in the U.S. last year; South Florida is expected to see more than 150,000 this year compared to fewer than [...]

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Obama’s Plan is a Particular Disappointment, Consumer Advocates Say

The relative failure of Obama’s plan is a particular disappointment, consumer advocates say. After spending hundreds of billions of dollars in bank bailouts, the administration proposed a plan that would pay mortgage servicers for successfully modifying eligible delinquent home loans. Investors that owned securitized mortgages that were modified would get paid, too. Most importantly, distressed [...]

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5 reasons why loan modifications are not happening

1. Why servicers foreclose when they should modify: The National Consumer Law Center takes a look into why loan servicers – the people who actually control most mortgages – aren’t helping home owners when they should. The report goes into a fair bit of depth over 60 pages. The report says that “servicers remain largely [...]

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Loan modification scams continue in Nevada

Boxes of complaints have poured into the state’s Business and Industry Department on people scamming homeowners out of thousands, claiming they can help modify loans but instead never do a thing.
“Weed out bad actors. When you put requirements in place, a lot of them will drop off, hopefully, because they have no intention of operating [...]

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Do Loan Servicers Really Prefer Foreclosures?

At the start of the foreclosure crises, personal finance experts urged struggling homeowners to contact their lenders if they started to fall behind on their mortgages. The lenders want to do everything they can, homeowners were told, to avoid a foreclosure.
Now, the experts aren’t so sure that’s the case.
Consumers who have jumped through a frustrating [...]

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Cheaper to foreclose than offer loan modifications

New Report Describes How Little Noticed Incentives Prompt Banks to Deny Relief to Homeowners
BOSTON, Oct. 20 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Why have several recent programs designed to encourage loan modifications failed to slow America’s
still-worsening home mortgage foreclosure crisis? A new report from the
National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) discloses that mortgage servicers -
including many large banks – have [...]

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The media loan-modification program

But I made a call to Select Portfolio Servicing anyway and left a message. A staffer called back, but only to ask what the questions were and to relay them to a higher-up.
Shortly after that, Nido’s attorney sent me an e-mail.
“I don’t know what you did but I’ve got an offer from SPS (Select Portfolio [...]

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Three sides to every loan modification story

The first article in the WSJ states that on October 8th the federal government said that 500,000 financially troubled homeowners had begun trial loan modifications. It cites Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner as saying that the rate of modifications is rising faster than the rate of the people needing them for the first time since the [...]

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Obama Administration looks to keep jobless in thier homes

The oversight panel argues in a recent report that the Treasury’s current mortgage modification program focuses on the problem evident early in the financial crisis – subprime mortgages that people can’t afford. Panel member Richard Neiman said the second wave of foreclosures is coming more from a loss of income and unemployment.
“The mortgage crisis may [...]

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Mountain of modifications

Millions of homeowners are struggling to make their monthly mortgage payments and the continued deterioration in the job market guarantees millions more will be at risk in the coming months.
That is putting a huge burden on mortgage-modification programs, both those run by the government and an increasing number operated by private industry, which are in [...]

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Florida homeowner faces loan modification confusion

“Some investors will not allow Making Home Affordable modifications because they cut the value of their investments too much — enough so they are losing money on their investment,” the spokeswoman said. “Investors don’t have to tell us why they decline a modification. It is not in our control.”
Now Brady is worried that the house [...]

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Bank of America Desoer says homeowners part of the loan modification problem

Now, servicers face challenges in turning 500,000 trial modifications granted into permanent ones with steps including document collection, Desoer said. Borrowers’ responses are part of the problem, she said.
“I listen to these calls every week, and we’ve got somebody talking on the phone while they’ve got four kids in the background, because they’ve got their [...]

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A Treasury rule on loan modifications riles the securities market

The $1.7 trillion mortgage securitization market is still a mess, despite (or in part because of) the Federal Reserve’s $700 billion splurge into the market. But another reason may be Treasury’s decision to undermine private mortgage-backed securities (MBS) contracts.
BlackRock Inc. Chairman Laurence Fink went so far recently as to call this “one of the biggest [...]

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Banks and Delinquent Borrowers: The Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost

Never mind that Bank of America seemed to think it was “entitled” to tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. Now the bank suddenly thinks that other people being “entitled” is such a bad thing? Who set the example?
The article also cites a disturbing trend:
On a recent morning, Tiffany Palmer was on the line with a [...]

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It is too soon to know how many trial loan modifications are failing

But economists said the true test will be how many trial modifications become permanent and how many borrowers default on their new loan arrangements.
“What has surprised us is the numbers that have made three, four, or even five payments, but still haven’t gone to close because the final documents aren’t in place,” Bisenius said. It [...]

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Linda woman fights bank so she can stay in her home

They don’t have to worry about whether they’ll lose their homes, Linda resident Mary Carter said.
Former executives with the Bank of America and Countrywide, once the largest mortgage lender in the nation, who were involved in the financial crisis that first made national headlines last year, are safe from sharing her status.
Their homes aren’t threatened, [...]

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Life after the bubble: From American dream to American nightmare

A year has passed since the peak of the great financial panic of 2008. Regulators and analysts alike spent much of September pontificating about the economy’s regained stability.

Debt: Life in Oregon after the bubble

Thanks to a multitrillion-dollar bailout, much of the financial sector has regained an uneasy equilibrium. Some banks that seemed on death’s door [...]

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The U.S. has miles to go with its mortgage modification plan

With foreclosure filings occurring every 13 seconds in America, is the Obama Administration really moving fast enough to get help for homeowners in trouble? It took about nine months to get 500,000 of them started on the road to mortgage modification.
A half-million homeowners helped is surely progress, but with 2 million foreclosures this year and [...]

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Customer DIS-Service: The Unspoken Reason for the Continued Collapse of the U.S. Housing Market

If it’s this hard for a housing counselor, what is the poor homeowner supposed to do? “Call a nonprofit, HUD-approved housing counselor,” say all the government brochures and broadcast public service announcements. But housing counseling agencies like ours cannot possibly handle the flood of calls for help we receive on a daily basis. Thousands of [...]

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Anti-foreclosure programs are not enough: watchdog

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Government programs to fight the U.S. home foreclosure crisis look increasingly inadequate and should be reworked, expanded and supplemented with new ideas, a congressional watchdog said in a report on Friday.
With a foreclosure filing occurring every 13 seconds, the United States is mired in a housing slump that is destroying billions of [...]

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Panel: Obama Loan-Mod Effort Ill-Suited To Avert Foreclosures

WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- The Obama administration’s loan modification effort is ill-suited to tackle the current causes of the foreclosure crisis, financial rescue watchdogs concluded in a new report.
Meanwhile, the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, wasn’t designed to address these problems, nor is it geared towards averting a looming wave of foreclosures caused by resetting option adjustable-rate [...]

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After $75 Billion, Homeowners Ask: Where’s the Money?

Complaints about the federal loan modification plans continue to pile up, as do foreclosures.
Darrell Goldberg of Chicago says he has been waiting since April for the packet of paperwork promised to him by CitiMortgage. Lori Gonzalez of Fox River says she has faxed and re-faxed a thick packet of her documents to Bank of America [...]

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Banks abuse borrowers

The Government Accountability Office – GAO – in July found that the Treasury was short staffed and had hired only half of the employees necessary to monitor the loan modification program.
Taxpayer dollars bailed out the banks from bankruptcy, now they’re back on track to pay out big bonuses while at the same time they are [...]

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Lack of Legal Help: One More Way the Deck Is Stacked Against Homeowners

Having legal help can be the difference between people keeping their homes and being evicted. A lawyer can stop foreclosure proceedings or put enough pressure on lenders to get them to rework the terms of the loan. A lawyer can also intervene in other ways, such as enforcing consumer protection laws or spotting legal violations [...]

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Mortgage relief hard to come by

Orion Wisness tried to control his temper as a Wells Fargo representative delivered the bad news: No, Wisness did not qualify for a new federal program that would give him a break on his monthly mortgage payments.
Five months had passed since Wisness, 35, lost his job at a Minneapolis law firm and asked to enroll [...]

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US Senate: STOP BEING STUPID

The reason we have this crap going on is quite simple, and fixing it is also quite simple:
Banks are holding homes back and foreclosing when they should be modifying as a direct consequence of the policies and actions of the government.
As just one example the “loss share” agreement made with the buyers of IndyMac has [...]

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Leaving Affordable Mortgage May Become Winning Gambit

“You have to ask yourself: Are you just renting the home from the bank?” said Michael Joe, a foreclosure expert at the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada. “Would it be cheaper to walk away and rent across the street?”
Conroy, 32, and his wife purchased their home for $385,000 in March 2006, a month before [...]

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