Posts tagged as:

obama foreclosure plan

Ohio Among States Least Helped By Fed Foreclosure Plan

by Moe Bedard

A new study shows that Ohio is one of the states least helped by President Barack Obama’s plan to help borrowers in trouble. It’s a distinction the state can hardly afford. Ohio has long been one of the worst hit states in the country’s foreclosure crisis. ideastream®’s Mhari Saito reports.
According to the US Treasury, just [...]

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Government Foreclosure Plan Causing Much Confusion

by Moe Bedard

For help she turned to “Making Home Affordable,” or MHA, the Obama administration’s program to help homeowners facing financial hardship, refinance their mortgages and avoid foreclosure.
For the Shrauners, it sounded like the perfect solution: a chance to cut their payments and keep their home.
But it wasn’t that easy. They would soon find that confusion over [...]

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Homeowners Not Happy With Government Housing Fix

by Moe Bedard

Trillions spent on propping up banks, buying mortgages, tax credits and new programs designed to lower payments and prevent foreclosures. And yet a new survey from Move Inc., the parent of Realtor.com, says Americans are growing increasingly dissatisfied with how Washington is handling the housing mess.
The October 2009 survey found that the federal government’s approval [...]

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Government foreclosure plan is working, but how good is the question

by Moe Bedard

The number of homeowners getting help from the government’s massive foreclosure program is growing, according to data released Tuesday, but it is unclear how many of these borrowers might still lose their homes.
Under the effort, called Making Home Affordable, lenders are paid to lower a borrower’s mortgage payments. The program has struggled since its launch [...]

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Panel: Government Foreclosure Plan Failing to Help Homeowners

by Moe Bedard

PHOENIX — Months after President Barack Obama came to Phoenix to announce his plans to fix the foreclosure crisis, some experts and homeowners say a key component of the program is not working.
“From the consumer’s point, it’s a failure,” said Kevin Hardin, Thomson Conant Mortgage Mediation Group Director.
Since the program was announced in February, Hardin’s [...]

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

by Moe Bedard

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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Anti-foreclosure programs are not enough: watchdog

by Moe Bedard

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

by Moe Bedard

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?

by Moe Bedard

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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Obama admin: foreclosure prevention effort on track

by Moe Bedard

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration’s effort to combat rising U.S. home foreclosures is on track to meet the goal of modifying more than half a million delinquent mortgages by November 1, a senior administration official said.
In testimony prepared for delivery at a congressional hearing on Wednesday, Federal Housing Administration Commissioner Dave Stevens said mortgage [...]

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Homeowners frustrated by mortgage assistance program

by Moe Bedard

“I don’t want a handout. I want to do the right thing,” Mark Kollar said. “I thought this was supposed to give us a chance.”
A CNN investigation revealed that the Kollars are far from alone. Housing counselors, homeowners and consumer advocates tell endless stories of banks giving homeowners the runaround: declining apparently eligible applicants; pressuring [...]

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Loan Modification Program Cries for Help: Are Mortgage Lenders Listening?

by Moe Bedard

But if my inbox (which is stuffed) is any indication, the troubles with loan modifications are multiplying across the country as home prices continue to sink.
Several weeks ago, President Obama called in the top mortgage lenders for a meeting and reportedly told them to get on the stick and do more loan modifications. The lenders [...]

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Frustration rises over mortgage relief program

by Moe Bedard

Nearly two years after the federal government’s first program to slow the relentless rise in the pace of home foreclosures, the latest attempt, known as Making Home Affordable, is turning out to be another painful disappointment for millions of Americans at risk of losing their homes.
Dozens of e-mails from msnbc.com readers report months of futile [...]

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Treasury Secretary Geithner and HUD Donovan Ask for More Loan Modifications

by Moe Bedard

WASHINGTON – With the Making Home Affordable (MHA) program delivering much-needed relief to homeowners and to our economy just over two months after the release of program guidelines, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan today provided an update on the program’s impact on stemming the housing crisis and [...]

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Silence Equals Consent

by Moe Bedard

By Moe Bedard
While a few stalwart senators tried to battle for the passage of the cramdown bill last week we heard a number of important opinions, both pro and con, regarding the proposed power of bankruptcy judges to reduce principle balances on home loans. It appeared obvious to me and a great deal of other [...]

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An Unbalanced Equation

by Moe Bedard

By Moe Bedard
Major banks except Citi have formally cut off all negotiations with the Senate in an effort to limit even further the scope of the cramdown bill. Senators from both sides of the isle have given up hope on further developments as well. Bloomberg’s report on the cramdown bill today seems like the last [...]

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Bond Investors to Sue the United States Government?

by Moe Bedard

By Moe Bedard
Wall Street War Brewing Against the Obama Plan, I argued that bond investors were going to start taking the job of protecting their assets seriously even though doing so makes no sense for Main Street. Today’s Financial Times ran an article indicating that these bond investors are so serious that they’re beginning to [...]

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Bank of America Formally Announces Participation in Federal Loan Mod Incentive Program

by Moe Bedard

By Moe Bedard
Last Friday, Bank of America formally announced its inclusion in to President Obama’s Loan Modification Incentive program. The program allocates 75 billion in aid to lenders and services to not only provide loan modifications under federal standards, but also agrees to subsidize payment reductions to 31% of a borrowers monthly income.
From CNN Money:

Mortgage [...]

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Federally Subsidized Loan Modification Program Kick Off

by Moe Bedard

By Moe Bedard
While the cramdown bill dies a silent death in the senate the government has guaranteed to pay lenders nearly ten billion more in taxpayer dollars to support loan modification efforts. Federal funds will initially be going to the largest lenders and servicers including Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, GMAC, Saxon and Select Portfolio Servicing.
As [...]

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Overpromising and Underdelivering?

by Moe Bedard

By Moe Bedard
Yesterday’s Hartford Courant ran a story about HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan’s efforts to ascertain for himself the state of the housing crisis around the country and what he’s doing to change the status quo. Apparently, Secretary Donovan thinks there ought to be yet another solution to the housing crisis that would magically preserve the [...]

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Keep on Refinancing: Obama’s Newest Solution

by Moe Bedard

This morning I read a news wire from Reuters about Obama’s newest message to the public: take advantage of some of the lowest mortgage rates in history. Over the last decade I’ve grown to be somewhat of a skeptical man regarding solutions put forward by our elected officials. This [...]

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Hidden in Obama’s Housing Bill, The Mortgage Investors Protection Act Of 2009

by Moe Bedard

Hiding in Obama’s foreclosure bill are provisions to protect big investors from bankruptcy cramdowns.
Washington is finally realizing that there are two types of mortgage investors and you usually can’t help one without hurting the other.
A last-second addition to the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009 would make it so that senior mortgage investors–often [...]

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Obama’s Foreclosure Dilema: Where’s the Accountability?

by Moe Bedard

Mortgage servicing is at the heart of the foreclosure crisis. Few people understand the role that servicers play as opposed to the institutions that provide loans (banks and lenders). When critical aspects of problems are not well understood the probability that problems will linger on increases exponentially.

Servicers do not merely accept payments from borrowers, they also play a major role in deciding when to foreclose on homes. As intermediaries between the borrower and the institutions that lend money, servicers clearly play a critical role in the solution to the ongoing crisis.

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HUD Secretary Donovan Speaks on the Obama Housing Plan

by Moe Bedard

SHAUN DONOVAN, HUD SECRETARY: We’re going to target those borrowers that are most at risk of foreclosure through our modification plan, helping to bring payments down to 31 percent of their income for three to four million borrowers. We’re going to target that in a way that first of all, no speculators, no investor-owners are [...]

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Details on Obama’s Home Affordable Loan Modification Program

by Moe Bedard

The Obama Administration’s Making Home Affordable program will offer assistance to as many as 7 to 9 million homeowners making a good-faith effort to make their mortgage payments, while attempting to prevent the destructive impact of the housing crisis on families and communities.
It will not provide money to speculators, and it will target support to [...]

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HUD Chief Defends Obama Housing Plan

by Moe Bedard

“We have millions of families across this country through no fault of their own that are in trouble on their mortgages,” he said. “Let’s remember that every time there’s a foreclosure, a next-door neighbor loses value in their house too… by stopping foreclosures, this benefits everyone.”

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Help for homeowners: Courtesy of the White House

by Moe Bedard

Questions and Answers for Borrowers about the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan

Borrowers Who Are Current on Their Mortgage Are Asking:

* What help is available for borrowers who stay current on their mortgage payments but have seen their homes decrease in value?

Under the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan, eligible borrowers who stay current on their mortgages but have been unable to refinance to lower their interest rates because their homes have decreased in value, may now have the opportunity to refinance into a 30 or 15 year, fixed rate loan. Through the program, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will allow the refinancing of mortgage loans that they hold in their portfolios or that they placed in mortgage backed securities.

* I owe more than my property is worth, do I still qualify to refinance under the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan?

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Obama administration delay foreclosure rescue details

by Moe Bedard

Few people would argue that there is a simple solution to the current mortgage and housing crisis. This crisis, however, has been brewing for years and now through two administrations. Is it sufficient that the present administration can clearly articulate the problem or is it time that we begin to demand specific answers from our [...]

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Will Obama Stand By His Foreclosure Moratorium and Bankruptcy Promises?

by Moe Bedard

Below are promises made to Main Street homeowners during President-Elect Obama‘s campaign in his own words from BarackObama.com.
“The final plan must provide help to families who are struggling to stay in their homes. We cannot simply bailout Wall Street without helping the millions of innocent homeowners who are facing foreclosure.” Obama September 2008
“Going forward, [...]

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