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Sunday, December 18, 2011

Another love note from BofA

Got another letter, via FedEx the other day. The letter said thank you for sending in your information, your loan modification is under review.

What the hell is going on behind that curtain?

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Oh my, its fruit cake weather

Fall is the best time of year. Not just MY favorite but the best (when its not raining.)

Its not tortuously hot, or miserably cold. The days are dark which gives you an excuse to hibernate, one of my favorite past times by the way. The colors are beautiful, and for some reason fall elicits the most memories from me, the colors, the crisp air. The smells.

I love fall. In my next life I want it to be fall, a lot.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

THE OFFICE OF THE COMPTROLLER.....KISSES BOAs ASS.

The Office of the Comptroller, is as corrupt as the banks.

My official complaint (made in the fall of 2010) was answered this week(IN THE FALL OF 2011.) I accused Bank of America of denying my Hamp Modification without justification, of reporting me to the credit Bureaus when they weren't supposed to, of charging me late fees when they weren't supposed to, OF lying about missing paperwork and more.

The OCC sends me a letter with copies of letters that BofA sent to them stating that they did not report me to the credit Bureaus (they did and I have proof,) of not charging me late fees (they did and I have proof,) of denying my Hamp because the property is NOT owner occupied,(it is,) of denying me because I did not send in paperwork, I did, (and I have proof.)

They then said, the case is resolved and it is closed.

Which 3rd world country do we live in? Oh yeah, 3rd world America.

Not only do they have the audacity to send copies of letters stating that they are denying the Hamp because I don't live in the house (I never got this letter, BTW,) the letter is ADDRESSED TO THE HOUSE! They make no attempt to disguise their corruption, and the OCC makes no attempt to reveal it.

Yes I am occupying the house, if you have read any of my posts you know this has been a sore point for me since they started this nonsense, the day before Thanksgiving last year.

I sent the OCC a certified letter explaining that BofA is perjuring themself FURTHER by saying these things, AND YES I HAVE PROOF.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Dennis Blackmon: Georgia Judge Mocks U.S. Bank Over Denied Mortgage Modification

Dennis Blackmon: Georgia Judge Mocks U.S. Bank Over Denied Mortgage Modification



Georgia Judge Dennis Blackmon is fed up with bailed-out banks refusing to help strapped homeowners.

"Sometimes, only the courts of law stand to protect the taxpayer. Somewhere, someone has to stand up," Blackmon wrote in a five-page Nov. 2 order in Carroll County Superior Court. "Well, sometimes is now, and the place is the Great State of Georgia. The defendant's motion to dismiss is hereby denied."

Blackmon's order shot down U.S. Bank's request to throw out a complaint from Georgia homeowner Otis Wayne Phillips, who had tried to get a mortgage modification from the bank. Phillips could not be reached for this story.

The order lays the case out like this: Phillips is in danger of foreclosure. U.S. Bank is among the "poorly run organizations" that recently received massive bailouts from the federal government and agreed to participate in the Obama administration's Home Affordable Modification Program. When Phillips applied for a modification, the bank denied his request "without numbers, figures, or explanation, reasoning, comparison to guidelines, or anything."

HAMP guidelines require banks to consider homeowners for modifications if they are at risk of falling behind on their payments because of a financial hardship and if their monthly mortgage expenses take up more than 31 percent of their income.

"This court cannot imagine why U.S. Bank will not make known to Mr. Phillips, a taxpayer, how his numbers put him outside the federal guidelines to receive a loan modification," Blackmon continued. "Taking $20 billion of taxpayer money was no problem for U.S. Bank. A cynical judge might believe that this entire motion to dismiss is a desperate attempt to avoid a discovery period, where U.S. Bank would have to tell Mr. Phillips how his financial situation did not qualify him for a modification."

If Phillips didn't qualify, Blackmon wrote -- with apologies to folksinger Arlo Guthrie -- why didn't the bank say so with "mathematic equations, pie charts, and bar graphs, all on 8 by 10 glossy photo paper, with circles and arrows and paragraphs on the back explaining each winning number"?

"Maybe U.S. Bank no longer has any of the $20 billion left, and so their lack of written explanation might be attributed to some kind of ink reduction program to save money," Blackmon continued. "Clearly, U.S. Bank cannot take the money, contract with our government to provide a service to the taxpayer, violate that agreement, and then say no one on earth can sue them for it. That is not the law in Georgia."

Consumer attorneys started circulating the order via email on Monday.

"It just demonstrates the frustration of the courts to the arguments being advanced by mortgage servicers over and over and over again," North Carolina attorney Max Gardner told HuffPost. "I think you could see the frustration on all four corners of that order."

Since its launch in 2009, the Home Affordable Modification program has been plagued by complaints of lost documents and miscommunication from banks' mortgage servicing divisions. Fewer homeowners have received permanent modifications than have been booted from the program. Banks can use an opaque "Net Present Value" test to deny a homeowner if a modification would be less profitable than a foreclosure.

Homeowners have brought a wave of still-ongoing lawsuits against banks for mortgage servicing abuses, and a coalition of state attorneys general is currently negotiating with the biggest banks for a settlement that would reform the mortgage servicing industry and provide some relief to homeowners. That settlement, if it ever happens, would not preclude borrowers from filing their own claims, though Gardner suggested banks would use it as leverage in court.

Blackmon's order says Georgia law allows claims for breach of a duty of good faith and fair dealing, and that there are two contracts at issue: the bank's agreement to participate in HAMP and its loan with Phillips. The case is on its way to a jury trial. "While difficult to define, jurors know good faith and fair dealing when they see it, and jurors can spot the absence of same."

Spokesman Tom Joyce said U.S. Bank would immediately pursue an appeal.

"The court's order contains a number of factual and legal errors," Joyce said. "On the broader topic, foreclosure is always the last option for borrowers and the bank. That's why we've worked with thousands of borrowers across the country on modifying their mortgages to help them manage their payments and stay in their homes."

This story has been updated to include comment from U.S. Bank.

Click HERE to download a PDF of Blackmon's order.

Arthur Delaney is the author of "A People's History of the Great Recession," HuffPost's first e-book.
FOLLOW HUFFPOST BUSINESS

Sunday, November 6, 2011

PRINCIPAL REDUCTION, THE ONLY REASONABLE SOLUTION

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/opinion/to-fix-the-housing-crisis-read-the-data.html?_r=1&src=recg

To Fix Housing, See the Data
By JOE NOCERA
Published: November 4, 2011

The idea of helping struggling homeowners by writing down some principal on their mortgages — as opposed to reducing the interest or reconfiguring the terms to lower the monthly payments — is much in the air right now. Banks loathe the idea of principal reduction; they fear that people who are current on their mortgages will start defaulting just to get their principal reduced. They also don’t want the hit to their balance sheets.

But the states’ attorneys general who sued over the robo-signing scandal have made principal reduction the central plank of the settlement they are close to completing. The settlement will force the big banks to begin a sustained program of principal reduction, and will heavily penalize banks that don’t comply. From what I hear, the goal of the states is to prove to the banks that principal reduction will not cause the sky to fall — and is, ultimately, less damaging to bank profits than foreclosures.

Housing activists love principal reduction because they tend to see it as a just solution to an unjust situation — it’s a way of making the banks pay a real price for their sins during the subprime madness while allowing people to keep their homes. Conservatives, on the other hand, hate principal reduction. They believe that borrowers who made poor decisions by taking out mortgages they could never afford have to take responsibility for those decisions. If that means foreclosure, so be it.

Enter Laurie Goodman. One of the country’s foremost authorities on mortgage-backed securities, she is also one of the most data-driven people I’ve ever met; at breakfast, she was constantly pointing me to one chart or another that backed up her claims. “She’s not into politics,” says my friend, and her client, Daniel Alpert of Westwood Capital. “She is using data to tell us the truth.”

Her truth begins with a shocking calculation: of the 55 million mortgages in America, more than 10 million are reasonably likely to default. That is a staggering number — and it is, in large part, because so many homes are worth so much less than the mortgage the homeowners are holding. That is, they’re underwater.

Her second calculation is that the supply of housing is going to drastically outstrip demand for the foreseeable future; she estimates that the glut of unneeded homes could get as high as 6.2 million over the next six years. The primary reason for this, she says, is that household formation has been very low in recent years, presumably because of the grim economy. (Young adults are living with their parents instead of moving into their own homes, etc.) What’s more, nearly 20 percent of current homeowners no longer qualify for a mortgage, as lending standards have tightened.

The implication is almost too awful to contemplate. As Goodman put it in testimony she recently gave before Congress, the supply/demand imbalance means that housing prices “are likely to decline further. This may recreate the housing death spiral — as lower housing prices mean more borrowers become underwater.” Which makes them more likely to default, which lowers prices further, and on and on.

The only way to stop the death spiral is through principal reduction. The reason is simple: “The data show that principal modifications work better” than other kinds of modifications, she says. Interest rate reductions can lower monthly payments, but the home remains just as underwater as it was before the modification. And the extent to which a home is underwater is the single best indicator of whether the homeowner will default. The only way to change the imbalance between the size of the mortgage and the value of the home is to reduce principal.

Will widespread principal reduction cause homeowners to purposely default on their mortgages? Goodman has some ideas about how to reduce that likelihood, but she is also realistic: “A borrower will make a decision to default if it is in his or her best interest.”

One wishes that the country could make economic decisions that are in its best interest, decisions that use Laurie Goodman’s data-driven approach instead of being motivated by ideology. Goodman’s case for principal reduction is powerful precisely because it is not about just or unjust, or who’s to blame and who’s at fault.

It is about cold, hard economics. Three years after the bursting of the subprime bubble, principal reduction isn’t just a nice-sounding way to help homeowners. It is our only hope of finally ending the housing crisis.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

The Autumn

A funny thing happened since September 17, 2011. I have lost my focus on the HAMP SCAM. Oh sure, it will show its ugly face again when the long awaited foreclosure notice shows up in the mail, or worse yet, when the Sheriff comes.......but my guess is it will just be another hit in the Hamp Scam process. I will fall, I will get up.

For now HAMP SCAM, is just a thing, a thing that happened to me a long time ago. Some thing, I barely remember.

I want it to be in the past, but I must play each and every had of this game of Scam. Its not time to fold yet, not yet BofA... we have a few more rounds to go.

Good night all.

Monday, October 10, 2011

the occupation

OK, first of all, I am exhausted from protesting every possibly minute, while I still work 7 days a week to "try" to survive. I am out there, at least I am participating.

For all of you voyeurs, get off your derrieres, put down the remote, or turn off the computer and get your asses out on the streets to protest.

This is why this country is in this situation. Complacency. No one wants to participate.

Get out there.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

OCCUPY THE WORLD

First of all I would like to say thank you to all the people who have hit the streets and started this glorious protest. Some of these kids don't even know what they are fighting for, and maybe they haven't even suffered yet(much,) but they have ideals, and they know right from wrong. Right from wrong is pretty easy if you think about it. I have no idea how the Glenn Becks (giant baby-looking dude,) of this world do it. I have watched him, he makes no sense. He says cruel, nasty stupid things, not to mention that little obsession he has with the Nazis.

At the Occupy Allentown protest on the 3rd, an old man came up and starting arguing with us; he lives well on his social security and other people ought to live within their means too. Five minutes into the conversation, I realized I was dealing with a brainwashed child of Fox news; I let someone else take over the argument, which was clearly lost on him.

He is middle America, he is the Tea Party, the masses who just don't understand that they have been bamboozled, sold a bill of goods that in fact is just plain rotten.

The bigger point is, now that the gig is up, the truth is coming out and out and out. No more sitting at home in our soon to be foreclosed on homes crying in our soup. We are joining together to take down that giant. The truth is, being out there on the street with my comrades, and a few traitors, gave me a sense of hope, and one that I haven't felt in a long time.

The times, they truly are a changing.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

BANK OF AMERICA PROTEST OCTOBER 2011

Bank of America protest

Allentown, pa
October 201
1

MacArthur road

Anyone being ripped off from any bank is welcome.

Contact me for info.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE A SPEAKER PLEASE LET ME KNOW AHEAD OF TIME.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Phone log BOA 9/7/11

Called BOA again, just for fun.

I was told they are doing everything possible to help me save my home...cough...cough, and once again, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. The Act 91 notice or the Notice of Default as it is called in other states is just a notice.

I asked the nasty guy what the account reads.

Here it is:
April 5thth Investor Declined Mod
April 13th, loan reactivated
April 28th went to underwriter for review
Declined on same date.

That's so funny. Wasn't it April 28th when the rep from BOA called and told me the mod was Approved? Oh yeah it was, I even blogged about it on that date.

Also it states that the loan was declined because I am not occupying the property. Really? So I guess I am having an out of body experience, because my brain keeps telling me I am occupying the property. Yup, wood ceiling, fireplace, I see it all as clear as day. In fact right at this moment I must be hallucinating because I see myself sitting at my dining room table with the red table cloth, looking out onto my deck where I have planters filled with vegetables I must have hallucinated that I grew this summer. Weird!

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

LAWSUIT FILED!

What a feeling! I filed today. It was a beautiful feeling to file that lawsuit ON THEM. The banks think they hold the reins. They direct us this way and that, and we follow out of fear, out of obedience, out of apathy.

Not all of us are following anymore. In fact many of us are leading now. We direct the reins,and they RESPOND! It feels much better to be on the horse, than to be the horse.

I invite all of my comrades in battle to do the same. In fact I will be posting my lawsuit for anyone who wants to copy and fill in their names, and file their own suit. The story is the same. Change a few facts and you have a viable lawsuit of your own. I will send it to you in word format so you can simply fill in the blanks and FILE.

I also will be getting my Fuckedbybankofamerica.com website up and running. Look for it in the near future.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

ACT 91 NOTICE RECEIVED AUGUST 19, 2011

So finally the Act 91 arrives. Well Bank of America, I hope you are looking forward to yet another lawsuit.

Monday morning I file. My lawsuit will be posted next week sometime for anyone interested in filing their own suit. It costs 54 dollars to file, (and a lot of work to create the suit, but it was a labor of love.) How much money will it cost BOA to defend?

I am one person. I have all of my records neatly organized from the August 2009 until now. 2 years worth of neatly filed documentation. I have it all backed up on (obviously not on my main computer,) and I have hidden all the original hard copies at a secret location. I suggest anyone who wants to file do the same,as BOA has proven that they are not legitimate nor trustworthy.

How many cases does BOA have. In this case I dare say the borrower has the upper hand.

Join the fight. Don't take it lying down. Time to get mad, get crazy, get moving!

Friday, August 5, 2011

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

IT JUST GETS BETTER

I THINK THE CORRUPTION IN THIS COUNTRY IS BEYOND 3RD WORLD ABUSE. AT LEAST IN A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY YOU CAN BRIBE SOMEONE AND ACCOMPLISH YOUR GOAL. HERE IN AMURRRRRICA NO ONE HAS ANY POWER BUT THE SUPER BANKS AND SUPER RICH. THERE IS NO ONE TO BRIBE BECAUSE THEY DON'T NEED YOUR LOUSY 100 BUCKS, THEY ARE THE SUPER RICH.

THIS LATEST ARTICLE IS THE ICING ON THE PROVERBIAL BEND OVER AMERICA CAKE.

"Prosecutors are contemplating giving Bank of America this kind of a broad release -- something not yet on the table for the other institutions, sources said -- but in exchange for more money to be used to finance mortgage modifications for a targeted set of borrowers."
"the banks could largely escape prosecution of alleged widespread wrongdoing."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/02/bank-of-america-justice-foreclosure-fraud-settlement_n_916490.html

TARGETED.... SO WHO TARGETS THEM? IS IT THE PEOPLE WHO THEY SCREWED OVER? NO!

So the scumbags are going to get immunity after all. They pick a select group of borrowers, ruling out ALL FREDDIE AND FANNIE MAE backed loans which is a crap load of the delinquent loans, THEY MODIFY THOSE LOANS, and everyone else has zero recourse. THIS MAKES ME WANT TO SCREAM.

THEY ARE BASICALLY SAYING WE CAN KICK YOU TILL YOU ARE DEAD... IT BENEFITS US, IT BENEFITS THE REBUGLICANS, IT BENEFITS THE POLITICIANS, AND ONCE AGAIN THE CITIZENS OF THIS WASTELAND COUNTRY GET CASTE ASIDE LIKE YESTERDAYS STALE BREAD.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

"When you scam someone don't complain if they scam you back."

I read this as a comment on an article recently. To all the people who are saying if you can't pay your mortgage and your servicer falsifies documents to expedite foreclosure, its OK.

This person coined something that I think was very clever. The banks scammed the world. They scammed the borrowers. So if the borrowers are now staying in their homes without paying, it is a justifiable consequence.

Internal Doc Reveals GMAC Filed False Document in Bid to Foreclose


by Paul Kiel

ProPublica, July 27, 2011, 1:07 p.m.

http://www.propublica.org/article/gmac-mortgage-whistleblower-foreclosure

GMAC Mortgage Corporate Headquarters in Horsham, Pa. (Rusty Kennedy/AP Photo)

GMAC, one of the nation's largest mortgage servicers, faced a quandary last summer. It wanted to foreclose on a New York City homeowner but lacked the crucial paperwork needed to seize the property.

GMAC has a standard solution to such problems, which arise frequently in the post-bubble economy. Its employees secure permission to create and sign documents in the name of companies that made the original loans. But this case was trickier because the lender, a notorious subprime company named Ameriquest, had gone out of business in 2007.
The State of the Government's Loan Modification Program


See the performance of all the mortgage servicers.
ProPublica's Foreclosure & Loan Mod Facebook Page


Ask questions, share your experiences, and connect with fellow homeowners on ProPublica's new foreclosure Facebook page.
Resources

Making Home Affordable.gov
The administration’s web site for the foreclosure prevention program. Provides an FAQ, homeowner examples, and other tools to see whether you might qualify for the program.
Foreclosure Avoidance Counselors
A list of HUD-approved housing counseling agencies nationwide.
FTC Tips for Mortgage Servicing Consumers
Tips for homeowners from the Federal Trade Commission.
Program Guidelines for Mortgage Servicers
These "supplemental directives" lay out how mortgage servicers are supposed to conduct the program.
Compensation for Mortgage Servicers
This Treasury Department document lays out how mortgage servicers are compensated for completed modifications
Calculated Risk
A finance and economics blog that provides news and metrics on the state of the housing market.

Did Your Bank Wrongfully Seek to Foreclose on You?

We'd like to hear from current and former homeowners who wrongfully faced foreclosure in the last couple of years.
Are You in Mortgage Servicing?

Have you worked for a servicer in a loan modification call center? We want to hear from you.

And so GMAC, which was bailed out by taxpayers in 2008, began looking for a way to craft a document that would pass legal muster, internal records obtained by ProPublica show.

"The problem is we do not have signing authority—are there any other options?" Jeffrey Stephan, the head of GMAC's "Document Execution" team, wrote to another employee and the law firm pursuing the foreclosure action. No solutions were offered.

Three months later, GMAC had an answer. It filed a document with New York City authorities that said the delinquent Ameriquest loan had been assigned to it "effective of" August 2005. The document was dated July 7, 2010, three years after Ameriquest had ceased to exist and was signed by Stephan, who was identified as a "Limited Signing Officer" for Ameriquest Mortgage Company. Soon after, GMAC filed for foreclosure.

An examination by ProPublica suggests this transaction was not unique. A review of court records in New York identified hundreds of similar assignment documents filed in the name of Ameriquest after 2008 by GMAC and other mortgage servicers.

Get ProPublica's stories delivered to your inbox

The issue has attracted growing scrutiny in recent months as bloggers, consumer attorneys and media outlets have identified what appears to be part of a pattern of questionable assignments filed across the country.

GMAC, which is still majority owned by the government, was at the center of what became known as the robo-signing scandal. The uproar began last fall after revelations that mortgage servicing employees had produced flawed documents to speed foreclosures. GMAC and other banks have acknowledged filing false affidavits in which bank officials claimed "personal knowledge" of the facts underlying thousands of mortgages. But GMAC and other servicers say they've since tightened their procedures. They insist that their records were largely accurate and the affidavits amounted to errors of form, not substance.

The issues surrounding the Ameriquest loan and others like it appear to be more serious.

"This assignment of mortgage has all of the markings of GMAC finding that it lacked a needed mortgage assignment in order to foreclose and just making it up," said Thomas Cox, a Maine foreclosure defense attorney.

In New York, it's a felony to file a public record with "intent to deceive."

"It's fraud," said Linda Tirelli, a consumer bankruptcy attorney. "I want to know who's going to do a perp walk for recording this."

No criminal charges have been filed in the robo-signing cases.

Asked by ProPublica about the document, GMAC acknowledged Stephan did not have authority to sign on behalf of Ameriquest. The bank said it is still planning to push ahead with foreclosure on the homeowner, who remains in the property.

Company spokeswoman Gina Proia said an internal review last fall into "suspected documentation execution issues" had flagged the loan as problematic and that GMAC is "determining what needs to be done in order to receive the necessary authorization."

"We will determine and complete the necessary steps to remediate and proceed with foreclosure," Proia said.

GMAC also declined a request from ProPublica to interview Stephan.

Another GMAC document obtained by ProPublica shows that in at least one recent incident, GMAC employees were still discussing the possibility of fabricating evidence needed to facilitate a foreclosure.

The company once again lacked a document that would show it had been assigned the mortgage. Since the lender was defunct and no assignment had ever been made, GMAC again seemed to be stuck. But the employee proposed in June of this year that GMAC file a sworn statement that the assignment had once existed but had been lost. It's unclear if such an affidavit was ultimately provided to a court.

Records also show that GMAC has continued to rely on documents signed by the very employee at the center of the robo-signing scandal—Jeffrey Stephan, the same employee who also signed the Ameriquest document in 2010. Stephan acknowledged in sworn testimony last year that he had been signing 400 documents each day, a revelation that helped kick off the scandal. According to a former employee and a consumer attorney, Stephan still works at GMAC, though he has been transferred to a different unit.

GMAC said it is still pursuing foreclosures based on assignments signed by Stephan. As part of a bid to rebrand itself, GMAC renamed its holding company Ally Financial last year.

"There is no reason or requirement to 'withdraw' valid assignments of mortgage that happened to have been signed by Mr. Stephan," said GMAC spokeswoman Proia, because there's "no requirement that [the assignment] be signed by a person with knowledge of any particular facts." All that mattered, she said, was that the signer had received the proper authority.

Banks have little reason to worry about their documents being challenged, since homeowners rarely contest foreclosure actions. In a filing with the New Jersey Supreme Court, GMAC said that of the more than 4,000 foreclosures it has handled in the state only about 4 percent of homeowners had contested the action.

When homeowners do challenge banks' documentation for foreclosures, they can have success. Late last week, the Vermont Supreme Court threw out a foreclosure case handled by GMAC due, in part, to a flawed assignment document signed by Stephan.

"It is neither irrational nor wasteful to expect the foreclosing party be actually in possession of its claimed interest," the court said, "and have the proper supporting documentation in hand when filing suit."

Since last fall, GMAC has added staff, increased training and added new procedures, said Proia. But some of those new hires have come from firms themselves accused of filing false foreclosure documents.

One manager at GMAC, Kevin Crecco, moved there from a position at the Law Offices of David Stern in Florida after the firm drew scrutiny from the state's attorney general for allegedly filing forged documents. Stern's office, once among Florida's biggest foreclosure law firms and labeled a "foreclosure mill" by critics, ceased operations earlier this year.

An internal organization chart from this spring for GMAC's foreclosure department lists Crecco as a manager overseeing roughly two dozen employees. GMAC declined to make Crecco available for an interview. He hasn't been accused of any wrongdoing.

Mortgage servicers like GMAC continue to be set up like assembly lines, with members of its "Document Execution" team responsible for signing documents. The organizational chart shows two "Document Execution" teams of 13 employees each.

The employees are tasked with, among other things, signing affidavits attesting to the accuracy of the basic facts of the loan, such as the mortgage amount, outstanding fees, etc. Affidavits are a necessary step to foreclosure in many states where banks have to go to court to seize a home.

During the robo-signing scandal, GMAC admitted that employees signing affidavits didn't verify the underlying facts. The bank says it has fixed the problems.

But consumer attorneys said that while GMAC's processes have improved, they haven't corrected basic flaws with their process.

Cox, the attorney who questioned Stephan last year as part of a foreclosure case, said employees on the "Document Execution" team still aren't truly checking the accuracy of the underlying information. Rather than digging for the original documents, employees on the team look at the numbers given by a GMAC database and double-check the math.

If the employee "just looks at a computer screen, that's not sufficient in my view," said Cox. He said he would soon be challenging affidavits GMAC recently filed in court.

Consumer attorneys also said the systems that servicers rely on are consistently plagued with inaccuracies, making a more thorough verification of the information necessary. "These days, homeowners are being forced to save every receipt, every letter, every statement, so that one day they can prove that their payment history is accurate and the bank is wrong," said Jim Kowalski, a consumer attorney in Florida.

GMAC's Proia said the company's procedures—which amount to a review of information in the company's computerized databases—were sufficient to file affidavits.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

LAWYERS SUING THE BIG BANKS.

The complaints are listed in pdf format. Worth looking at.


http://kramer-kaslow.com/litigation.html

Sunday, June 5, 2011

this is one of the funniest videos I have seen.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-3-2011/crisis-in-the-dairyland---for-richer-and-poorer---teachers-and-wall-street

Saturday, May 21, 2011

BREAKING NEWS.....

THEY ARE DOING AWAY WITH THE ARMS LENGTH LAW.

THE ARMS LENGTH LAW SAID THAT THE BUYER IN A SHORT SALE PROCESS COULD NOT BE RELATED TO THE OWNER. SO IF YOU WERE LUCKY ENOUGH TO HAVE A FAMILY MEMBER WHO COULD SAVE YOU, WELL.....THEY COULDN'T SAVE YOU.

THIS COULD CHANGE EVERYTHING FOR SOME PEOPLE. IT COULD KEEP PEOPLE IN THEIR HOMES AND KEEP FORECLOSURES AND SHORT SALES OUT OF THE HOUSING POOL.

IS THE LIGHT BEGINNING TO PEEP THROUGH THE LONG DARK TUNNEL?


I SUSPECT THAT IT MAY BE.

Friday, April 29, 2011

BANK OF I SCREWED AMERICA OVER........... called me yesterday.

We are finishing up your mod she said. What mod I said? I was denied months ago, on every possible level. Oh no I am working on the last bit of your paperwork right now. Just send me over your P&L from the first quarter of last year and put a start and end date on it. That's it, you're approved. We ironed out that little occupancy issue. You mean that bogus crap you ruined my Thanksgiving over last year? That shit you made up stating that I don't live in my house? Yes, that one. I see now that you do live in your house, so I have corrected that.

Here we go again. I thought this ride from hell was over, but I guess we have a few more rounds to go. I gave her my email address in my stunned silenced state. She repeated it correctly, the email never came.

Today out of morbid curiosity I called them. You know who, BANK OF I SCREWED AMERCIA OVER. I was told that as of 4/28/11 (yesterday, the day I got that call,) I was denied due to the property not being owner occupied. Now I have no idea why this drives me nuts. Maybe if they said we are denying you because we want to, I wouldn't be so annoyed, but please STOP SAYING I DON'T LIVE IN MY HOME...... I LIVE HERE. After all BANK OF I SCREWED AMERCIA OVER, you yourself have sent out a mulititude of people to verify my occupancy. They have driven up my long private driveway, knocked on my door at 8 in the morning, asked me stupid questions about my lot size, etc. Can you at least just start saying, we want your house, we want the insurance money, we are going to steal it and we think there is a good chance we will get away with it.

Now I should have been annoyed that they said I was approved when they meant denied, but I keep letting that owner occupancy issue annoy me. I guess its a distraction. Some weird psychological warfare.

I did finally reach the person who called me, she said pay no attention to that man behind the curtain (the rep who said I was denied yesterday,) you were not denied, you were approved, (well not really,) I am sending your application over to your investor for approval, but WE APPROVED IT on our end, so I guess if you don't get it, its not our fault.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

BTW I forgot to mention.

Bank of America told me I am still "under review" for both the HAMP and an in-house mod.... HEllO, about ten people told me I was denied and COULD NOT RE-APPLY. Whatever!

I read over my law suit today. I thought maybe I would be filing it soon so I might want to review it. Its unbelieveable what I went through last year. Reading it over was like suffering through it all over again. The damage that Bank of America and this scam did to me is indescribable. It changed me.

To them it was just another day at the office, and woo hoo a great year for business. Will their day ever come?

California bill to make banks pay 20,000 for each foreclosure.

Check out this article. Lets hope it gets through. This is exactly what we need. The banks need some motivation to MODIFIY LOANS.

http://www.canadianbusiness.com/markets/market_news/article.jsp?content=D9M0H8E02

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Here is comment from someone following the HAMP SCAM

"That’s crazy that they keep SAYING something different every time you call but then again, when it’s a scam you have to make it up as you go."
M

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Bank of America keeps telling me I cannot apply for the HAMP again.

I am wondering if they are just trying to discourage as many people as possible. Now that the gig is up, and they can't use HAMP to rack up excess fees anymore, without the light of the world being shone upon them, they no longer have any interest in the game?

I will call again in a day or so and apply again with someone new. Each and every person I spoke with said something different.

One said you need to wait 30 days after you are denied to apply again. Another said you need to have new extra income to apply again. Another said you have to wait until you get the denial LETTER in the mail. Of course I never got any letter....but that's OK, this will all be addressed in my law suit. How they dragged me through the proverbial ringer for 20 months just to increase the fees they can collect when they foreclose. The bogus fees they charge for having people drive up to my house over and over again to confirm occupancy, when I have sent them repeated proof of my occupancy.

I sent them my driver's license, recent utilily bills, car insurance, phone bills etc, yet still they need to pay people to come knock on my door at 8 am. And the funny thing is that they pay these people $50. and they charge Fannie Mae $100. for the "service" that was never needed in the first place.

The bottom line is until some of the top CEOs start paying with their freedom, AKA "prison" this crap is not going to stop. Let me rephrase that more positively. When they start throwing these CEOs in jail then this corruption WILL STOP.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

A Young Lawyer's Fight To Save The Homes Of Low-Income Families

For some low-income homeowners in DC, a home loan modification can mean the difference between keeping a house that's been in the family for generations, and homelessness.

But pursuing a modification can also mean endless phone calls, pricey faxes, and piles of paperwork with no guarantee of protection from wrongful rejection. This is where Jennifer Ngai comes in.

Jennifer, a 30-year-old attorney and Equal Justice Works Americorps Legal Fellow at the Legal Aid Society, specializes in navigating this frustrating system for Washington, D.C. residents who qualify for loan modifications, but are trapped in an endless maze of contradictory information. She tirelessly works to secure permanent, affordable modifications for families who would otherwise be homeless.

Jennifer explained that despite the fact that banks were given financial incentives to work with homeowners who are behind on their loans, "the reality is that no one could possibly make it through the phone and fax system where you can never talk to the same person twice, and you get inconsistent information."

"A lot of my clients belong to this very specific population of being very low income, where if they lost their house, they would truly be at the very bottom of the poverty level and they could not afford to rent," Jennifer said. "I have clients who have very, very low mortgages and defy many of the stereotypes that I think a lot of people in foreclosure are judged by." Jennifer said clients have been brought to foreclosure owing as little as $2000. "Frankly, the bank doesn't care what the dollar amount is," she added.

Jennifer said her most representative case involved working with a home owner who lost her job at a department store and realized that she wouldn't be able to make the $500 monthly payments on her home equity loan. But because her husband had a large enough salary, she qualified for a modification. "She tried, but every time she called, she got different information," Jennifer said. When Jennifer got involved, the family were just a week from losing their home, pulling their daughter out of school and finding another place to live.

"We had to put up a fight," she said. But in the end, they got the interest rate and payments lowered to an affordable level, and the term extended to 30 years. "They were able to carry on with their lives," Jennifer said.

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AdvertisementEven as an attorney, Jennifer said she gets the same runaround as her Legal Aid clients. "The only difference between me and a homeowner is that I have the leverage of understanding the legal requirements of the bank, and the program requirements of [the Obama Administrations Home Affordable Modification Program], so I can escalate and I can threaten to litigate, and I can litigate if I have to," said Jennifer.

If endless phone calls don't work, Jennifer explained she knows how to get in touch with people higher up the ladder at mortgage companies, even going as far as writing letters to the CEO.

"The best thing we've found is to keep things in writing, and to escalate, escalate, escalate," she said.

"[This] sometimes means trying to work with someone in the office of the president of a mortgage company, sometimes it means trying to find a legal contact, sometimes it means writing to the CEO because you just can't get traction with anybody else."

Though she's dabbled in the realm of corporate law, Jennifer's has always leaned toward work in the public interest arena.

"Towards the end of college, I was really looking for a way to use communication skills, and be a bit more of a problem solver," said Jennifer.

She was working in consumer law, mostly working with big companies when she found out the Legal Aid Society were planning to help low income families dealing with foreclosures.

Immediately, she wanted to be part of it and hasn't looked back. "It's really rewarding work," she said.

by Yepoka Yeebo

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/08/no-way-to-live_n_819935.html#s236280&title=The_Financial_Crisis

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Not a single prosecution for the banking fraud that has been committed.

Oh but their time will come, I see it clearly before me. It is still not entirely well know amoung the mainstream population what the banks have done, but their day in court will come, I feel it.

It will be somewhat amazing when it all comes out. Someone will write a best selling book, Oprah will do a piece on it and people will act surpirsed and suddenly sympathetic. I hope I can forgive them.

For those of us who got caught up in the cogs of this broken down machine, we will be long gone and oblivious to the pain and suffering of the next group of "middle class" people to fall. Why should be care about them? They pointed a finger at us as we fell. They blammed us as we clawed and begged for survival. We were alone, so we thought. No one to talk to, we blammed ourselves. People committed suicide. I have stories of some of these people on this blog. They didn't know that there were millions of Americans falling. They felt alone and to blame. Obviously they weren't.

I remember a few years ago a story of a family, you all probably remember this story. Both the mother and father were laid off from their jobs. The father killed his wife, his three children and himself. At the time I thought it outrageous, but having lived through the war of financial destruction, I understand it now in a way I NEVER COULD HAVE BEFORE. It has made me a stronger person, a deeper person, an angrier and a happier person all at the same time.

I know what failure looks like from the inside, and its ugly. I know what it feels like and I know what it feels like to think that you would be better off dead. As crazy as that sounds, I guess its one of those things you just have to have been there!

I wish I could have a chat with that father today. Had he only known what was happening, had he known what was going to happen, had he just not been so unlucky to be one of the first to fall, maybe, just maybe that
family would be here today, happily living in their affordable rental.

Friday, February 4, 2011

Shahien Nasiripour Financial Crisis Prosecutions On Wall Street Slow To Develop Despite Cries For Justice

NEW YORK -- After the last major banking crisis, some two decades ago, roughly 3,800 bankers were prosecuted and sentenced to prison terms, by the Justice Department's count. Yet this time, some four years after the economy descended into the most punishing financial crisis since the Great Depression, the public still waits for the Obama administration to deliver a similar kind of justice.

The 2007-'09 financial crisis was "avoidable," a bipartisan, congressionally-appointed panel concluded last week. Mortgage fraud "flourished" in the run up to the collapse. Securities fraud was apparently widespread.

"Lenders made loans that they knew borrowers could not afford and that could cause massive losses to investors in mortgage securities," the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission wrote in its report on the causes of the collapse. About $1 trillion worth of home loans made from 2005 to 2007 were "fraudulent," the commission said, citing testimony from experts. The Illinois Attorney General, Lisa Madigan, told the commission that she defined fraud to include lenders' "sale of unaffordable or structurally-unfair mortgage products to borrowers."

And yet, the perp walk so many Americans crave -- Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner once referred to it as the "very deep public desire for Old Testament justice" -- hasn't occurred. Wall Street figures have largely gone untouched. Bank directors kept their jobs. In a sign that perhaps the fallout from the crisis has passed, outsized compensation is back.

"People need to go to jail," said Liz Ryan Murray, policy director of National People's Action, an advocacy organization that helped launch the website CrimeShouldntPay.com. "If you steal something, you go to jail. If you falsify documents, you go to jail. Why doesn't that apply to big bank executives?"

Officials from the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have been asked those questions before -- often during testimony before various congressional panels. DOJ prosecutes crimes, while the SEC files civil cases, though it can also refer cases to Justice for criminal prosecution.

But those powers haven't been used enough, experts say. The law-enforcement agencies suffer from a lack of combativeness. They're handicapped by the fact that they're looking at potential violations not while they're in the act, but long after they were committed. And they deal with complicated transactions that could be difficult to explain to juries, rendering their efforts to take cases to trial more challenging.

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Advertisement"These are tremendously difficult cases to make," said retired federal judge Stanley Sporkin, who worked at the SEC for 20 years, seven of them as head of the commission's enforcement division.

Referring to the most prevalent allegations of fraud, those involving home mortgages and the financial instruments they were packed into, Sporkin said law enforcement is likely having trouble "finding where it started, what the person did, and where the fraud is."

Last year, the Justice Department promised to take swift action. "By taking dramatic action, our goal is not just to hold accountable those whose conduct may have contributed to the last meltdown, but to deter such future conduct as well," Attorney General Eric Holder said in January 2010 during testimony before the crisis commission.

A year later, that action hasn't materialized, despite evidence of conduct that would seem to merit it. Last week, the Federal Crisis Inquiry Commission concluded that banks that sold home-loan bonds often didn't disclose key details that would have helped investors accurately judge the quality of the investments. Investors were rarely told, for example, whether the mortgages failed to meet the banks' own standards.

That failure raises "the question of whether the disclosures were materially misleading, in violation of the securities laws," the crisis commission said. It referred several financial-industry figures to law enforcement for potential prosecution.

"I'm frustrated," former Sen. Ted Kaufman told Lanny Breuer, the assistant attorney general heading the Justice Department's criminal division, and Robert Khuzami, head of enforcement at the SEC, during a September hearing. "We have seen very little in the way of senior officer- or boardroom-level prosecutions of the people on Wall Street who brought this country to the brink of financial ruin. Why is that? Is it because none of the behavior in question was criminal? Is it because too much time passed before the investigators got serious? I mean is it -- has the trail gone cold?"

Or, the Delaware Democrat asked, "Is it because the law favors the wealthy and powerful?"

Jeff Connaughton, Kaufman's former chief of staff, said prosecutors and enforcement officials at the SEC aren't being aggressive enough.

Last November, Connaughton delivered a stinging speech to about 300 regulators and Wall Street executives at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York slamming law enforcement's response to the financial crisis.

Fraud was at the heart of the crisis, he said. And law enforcement's response has been inadequate, to the point that it is unlikely to deter future financial fraud.

"Where are the cases?" Connaughton asked. "There have been many successful cases brought against mortgage brokers, as well as an impressive list of recent cases against Ponzi schemes and insider trading."

But after the Justice Department in 2009 lost a high-profile case against two hedge-fund managers at the defunct investment firm Bear Stearns Cos., Connaughton noted, there have not been any additional criminal indictments at major firms for behavior connected with the financial crisis.

"They realized how difficult it is to make a case" in the litigation against Bear Stearns, Sporkin said. "These are not easy cases."

Sporkin added that the SEC and the Justice Department may now be "gun-shy."

In September, Kaufman said he had thus far "waited in vain for the sort of prosecutions that we predicted would come" as a result of the financial industry's near-collapse.

"Criminals on Wall Street must be held to account," he said.

DOJ and SEC spokesmen declined to make officials available to answer questions on the record. Instead, the spokesmen referred questions to previous congressional testimony and public speeches.

The SEC said it had pursued executives at New Century Financial, once the nation's second-largest subprime mortgage lender; Goldman Sachs Group; Citigroup; and a top executive at Taylor, Bean & Whitaker, once the nation's largest nonbank mortgage lender. Most of those cases have been settled.

"We've brought a series of important enforcement actions in areas that most people associate with the financial crisis, and recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors in those cases," Lorin Reisner, deputy director of the SEC's enforcement division, wrote in an email. But, he added, "there is more work to be done."

The Justice Department also indicted the Taylor, Bean & Whitaker executive, Lee B. Farkas, and is said to be pursing a criminal investigation of Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide Financial, once the nation's biggest mortgage lender.

In a November speech, Breuer, the assistant attorney general, touted Justice's few victories and explained the department's philosophy. It's emblematic of law enforcement's overall tone towards the financial sector, experts say.

"There are some who, despite this track record, have expressed disappointment that we have not yet criminally prosecuted the leading financial institutions or their principals for conduct that may have helped lead to the financial crisis," Breuer said Nov. 4 in New York. "Though I can certainly understand the impulse and desire to hold someone accountable, I also want to stress an equally important principle - that we can, and will, only bring charges when the facts and the law convince us that we can prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt."

Added Breuer: "We simply can't, and won't, indict people based on outrage or suspicion alone."

While he oversaw the SEC's enforcement division, Sporkin took a different approach.

The former judge, who also served as general counsel at the Central Intelligence Agency after he left the SEC, said his philosophy could best be described as "getting in the first strike."

"What I tried to do was be ahead of the curve," Sporkin said. "Rather than react, I was looking for the issues and then striking almost as you would in a war."

Sporkin's team, he said, looked for laws that enabled them to go after what they viewed as fraudulent activity.

"We were being instinctive. We were using our abilities to say, 'What the hell is going on here?' and then using the law to go after" corporations and Wall Street firms engaged in wrongdoing, he said.

Sporkin's approach stands opposite that of today's law enforcement, said Joshua Rosner, managing director at independent research consultancy Graham Fisher & Co.

"In the old days, [the SEC] was not shy about bringing actions against even the largest firms and would litigate," Rosner said. "The offender knew that settling without admission of wrongdoing was not an option."

Rosner said the risk that prosecution poses to a firm's reputation is much more effective when trying to change future behavior, as opposed to the SEC's current approach of settlements and fines. He added that the SEC appears to be going after small-time crooks, rather than big firms on Wall Street.

"The SEC might as well list the penalties today so banks can just build it into their necessary rates of returns on infractions -- kind of like the back of a parking ticket," he said.

The former SEC enforcement chief said another problem hindering current prosecution of financiers is the lack of dramatics associated with today's financial crimes.

"You got to make it sound like it's somebody coming to you, knocking on your head, and taking money out of your pocket," Sporkin said of his approach to juries and explaining financial wrongdoing to the public. "You just can't try these as some kind of academic case."

"Too bad he's not at the SEC now," Rosner said of Sporkin. Likewise, Connaughton, Sen. Kaufman's former chief of staff, said law enforcement "needs someone like a Stanley Sporkin."

Even Sporkin, however, stressed that prosecutors and enforcement attorneys at the SEC face an uphill battle.

"How do you tell a jury that a person who didn't disclose something in a report should go to jail?" he asked. "These are hard cases to dramatize."

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Thursday, February 3, 2011

For anyone who has spent any time in fear or shame, this article is for you.

People from all walks of life have found themselves in this situation. Its not your fault, you are not to blame, nor are you alone. Life will get better; keep moving forward and leave the guilt, fear and shame at the door-step of your favorite bank.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/03/learning-to-walk-underwater-mortgages_n_818315.html

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

WATCH THIS VIDEO.

Hello FINALLY! They are admitting, that HAMP was used by the banks to increase vevenue. We have been screaming this for over a year.

Whew! Its about time....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/01/rethink-hamp-jeff-merkley_n_817242.html

HAMP STEALS ANOTHER HOME

Michigan Family Says Obama Foreclosure-Prevention Program Cost Them Their Home



The following story is produced in partnership with The Dylan Ratigan Show's week long "No Way To Live" series on the financial crisis and its impact on ordinary Americans, and in collaboration with Meetup.com, which is hosting HuffPost Mortgage Modification Madness Meetups across the country, where homeowners can meet others who've had similar difficulties with lenders.

After nine months of dutifully making lowered mortgage payments under the Obama administration's foreclosure-prevention program, Bea and Terry Garwood of Pinckney, Mich., are all set to move out. Despite the promise of relief, they are losing to foreclosure the two-story house that has been their family home since 1994. They say the administration's initiative has effectively pushed them out the door.

The Garwoods are among nearly 800,000 American households that have managed to enroll in the program before failing to secure permanently lowered monthly payments. Their experience underscores why many housing experts and lawmakers have proclaimed the effort a failure. Though President Barack Obama promised it would help three to four million homeowners avoid foreclosure, only 522,000 had successfully secured so-called permanent loan modifications by the end of last year, according to the Treasury Department.



More homeowners have actually been bounced from the program than have been helped, the data show. Despite widespread anticipation that foreclosures will only accelerate in 2011, breaking a record set last year, the number of new borrowers entering the program has been slowing to a trickle: Most of the potential new applicants lack sufficient income to qualify for lowered payments. The program was designed to help people confronting mortgages whose low promotional interest rates give way to much more expensive terms, and not for the circumstances at hand, with holders of traditional loans losing jobs and income.



A Treasury spokeswoman said the HAMP program was never intended as a cure-all for the foreclosure crisis. "It wasn't designed to prevent every foreclosure," said the spokeswoman, Andrea Risotto.



The Garwoods--who live with their two children, a 13-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son--complain that they wasted their money making payments on a trial basis, hoping this would deliver permanent relief, only to find themselves on the verge of losing their home of more than 16 years.



"I feel like I am in hell," said Bea Garwood, 41, who works as an accountant at the University of Michigan in nearby Ann Arbor. "The last thing we ever, ever wanted was this to happen. We don't even want to be there no more. We don't feel comfortable no more. We don't feel like it's our place."

The Garwoords' experience with their bank - the unexplained delays; the conflicting advice; the lost documents; the difficulty in finding a human being to talk to, let alone one familiar with their case; the inexplicable fees and letters of rejection - is familiar to millions of homeowners who have sought mortgage modifications either through HAMP or a bank's own program. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with homeowners over the past two years, a strikingly clear picture emerges of the similarities between the many experiences of homeowners that are unique only in their details. A homeowner lost in the maze of a bank's phone system may feel alone but, in reality, is lost with millions of others. To connect homeowners who've had similar trouble with their banks, HuffPost is teaming with Meetup.com and MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan to launch Mortgage Madness Meetups across the country. Get a Meetup in your neighborhood going here.
Last week, Republicans in the House introduced a bill that would end the program, known as the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP. Though few observers anticipate the measure has any real chance of becoming law, Democrats are hardly eager to defend it. In a written statement, the administration said homeowners would suffer if Congress repealed the program, but the President made no mention of it in his recent State of the Union address.

Obama's initiative enables homeowners to lower their monthly payment by decreasing the interest rate on their mortgage, extending the life of the loan, and, in some cases, deferring large amounts of principal to the end of the loan. But the program depends upon the cooperation of mortgage companies, whose participation is voluntary. The institutions that collect monthly mortgage payments--servicers, in industry parlance--control the process through which homeowners receive assistance, under contracts with the Treasury. In return for incentive payments, banks administer the program and try to place homeowners in new mortgages to avoid foreclosure.

Many homeowners who have tried to avail themselves of the relief program complain that they have fallen prey to a never-ending run-around in which they are frequently told they qualify for debt relief, then make on-time payments and submit the necessary paperwork, only to eventually be informed that their payments have been lost or their documents never received. Finally, they are kicked out of the program, with their houses placed in foreclosure.



A federal auditor noted in October that the program's drawn-out trial modifications waste the resources of homeowners who have no shot at securing permanent relief, leaving them with "more principal outstanding on their loans, less home equity (or a position further 'underwater'), and worse credit scores."



"Even in circumstances where they never missed a payment," the report added, "they may face back payments, penalties, and even late fees that suddenly become due on their 'modified' mortgages and that they are unable to pay, thus resulting in the very loss of their homes that HAMP is meant to prevent."

That is precisely what the Garwoods say happened to them.



The Garwoods say they never even asked for a loan modification, but applied only after their bank, JPMorgan Chase, contacted them in early 2009 and identified them as ideal candidates. According to the Garwoods, the bank noticed that they were one month behind on their mortgage, owing to the seasonal nature of Terry Garwood's roofing business.



Chase, through a spokesman, declined to comment on the family's history, but noted that it has willingly postponed planned sheriff's sales of their home pending resolution.



"We try to help homeowners stay in their homes whenever possible through programs like HAMP and our own modification programs," said the Chase spokesman, Tom Kelly. "We have helped nearly 500,000 families avoid foreclosure."

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AdvertisementUnder the program rules, homeowners who are delinquent or at risk of falling behind on their mortgages are eligible for lowered payments if their current monthly payments amount to more than 31 percent of their existing income. Chase put the Garwoods in a trial plan that saved them about $500 per month.

Homeowners that succeed in making three timely trial payments and are then able to document their continued eligibility are supposed to be approved for permanent modifications. But last March, after making trial payments for nine months, the Garwoods say they received a letter from the bank informing them that they had been rejected for a permanent modification. Worse, the bank said they now owed an additional $12,000--the difference between their reduced payments under HAMP and what they would have been paying without it, plus fees. If they failed to pay, the result would be foreclosure, Chase said.

Since then, the fees and arrears have only multiplied. According to the Garwoods, Chase now demands $26,000 to catch up--a number far from the realm of possibility. They say they have enough to move into a rented apartment, but nowhere near enough to settle the account.

The Garwoods owe roughly $140,000 on their mortgage, and similar homes in their neighborhood are going for about $100,000. That places them among the one-fourth of all American mortgage-holders who are underwater, meaning they owe the bank more than their home is worth. Researchers say homeowners who fall underwater are significantly more likely to default on their mortgage.

The administration's program, though, was not designed to address this. Experts say the only way to give underwater borrowers an incentive to keep making payments is to cut the size of their loan principal to restore their ownership stake. The average homeowner with a permanent HAMP modification owes $1.18 on their mortgage for every $1 their home is worth, according to the Treasury Department. Most HAMP modifications push borrowers even deeper under water by tacking on late fees and delinquent payments to their overall mortgage, raising the total amount due.

Meanwhile, home prices are falling, adding momentum for more defaults, more foreclosures and--completing a feedback loop--further drops in home values. Fitch Ratings, one of the three major credit rating agencies, forecasts a 10 percent decline in home values this year.

Experts criticize the Obama administration for declining to pressure mortgage companies to write down the value of outstanding home mortgages, which has left homeowners in untenable positions while shielding lenders from losses they would otherwise have to absorb.

"HAMP is a failure," said Joshua Rosner, managing director at independent research consultancy Graham Fisher & Co., adding that the only way to transform it into a meaningful support for homeowners is to shrink principal balances.

The Garwoods say their experience has been bewildering. Every week, says Terry Garwood, 39, a different Chase representative calls him with a different account on the status of his application.

"They call and leave numbers to extensions that don't exist," he said. "You can't talk to anybody. You can't get anywhere with these people."



Even as he has made payments on time on a trial basis, he complains, Chase has reported him to credit agencies as delinquent.



"I didn't know I was getting a black spot on my credit," he said. "It completely destroyed my credit and the chances of owning a home or buying a car."

The Garwoods have not made a mortgage payment since last spring, when they were confronted with the ultimatum--hand over money they do not have or submit to foreclosure. Now, they are preparing to pack up and move into a nearby apartment. But when they will have to leave remains as uncertain as every aspect of their frustrating experience with their bank.

"It's got to be borderline criminal," said Terry Garwood. "Basically it allowed them to steal my house from me."

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

BOA is calling me now offering me money. Its called the HAFA SCAM.

HA a lousy 3 grand to do a short sale. Well in case any of you are not familiar with the Short Sale, it is just another scam along the way of loosing your home. You market your home, let tons of creeps who are looking to feel pround of their shopping skills by landing a short sale, look through your home, open your cabinets, look through every crevice of your life, then if you are "lucky" one of these creeps submits an offer. Then your agent presents offer after offer to the banks who find something wrong with each offer. Each time you submit a new offer, you have to "prove" your lousy financial situation again. Its like applying for a modification all over again, and over again, and over again.

All this for 3 grand? Hello? If I just stay here rent free eventually the banks may offer me 10 grand to leave. So Bank of America. Screw you and all of your CEOs making a million 5 a year. You can all go to hell. And believe you me, we know you will.

Monday, January 17, 2011

They say the 3rd time is a charm, but not in Home Loan Modification Land.

I just got denied for the 3rd time.

So Where do we go from here? They say I have insufficient income. Oh well that makes sense then! If I don't make enough to afford a lower payment, I should make the higher payment.

I am applying again. Who knows where this road will lead. Its a long and winding road, that much I do know.

Monday, January 10, 2011

This is the Case may change History. Great Article by Richard Zombeck

Richard Zombeck.Eyes and Ears Mortgage Specialist and ShametheBanks.org Founder
Posted: January 10, 2011 Massachusetts Courts to Banks on Foreclosures: The Law Matters
On Friday the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld a controversial decision by Land Court Judge Keith C. Long, who ruled in the case of two Springfield, MA homeowners that the foreclosures were invalid because the mortgages were not officially recorded as being owned by the foreclosing banks, US Bancorp and Wells Fargo.

The reaction from Wall Street came shortly after the decision was announced. Within a couple of hours Wells Fargo shares were down nearly 4 percent at $30.92, while U.S. Bancorp was down 1.4 percent at $25.93, Bank of America stock was down 2.8 percent, JPMorgan fell 3.7 percent, and the KBW Bank Index, which includes all four lenders, was down 2.3 percent.

In short, the Supreme Court upheld the March 2009 decision of the lower court that a bank can't foreclose on a home if it doesn't own the mortgage. You can read the 16-page decision here.

This simple statement would seem like a no-brainer, but as a result of fast and loose securitized mortgage lending practices, the ownership of a mortgage could potentially be divided and transferred multiple times by the lenders. As I pointed out in a post back in November, in one week alone there were 808 mortgage transfers in just one county in Massachusetts.

The documentation for these transfers (i.e., the assignments at the Registry of Deeds) on the other hand often lags far behind - in many cases months, or even years after the foreclosure has taken place. This makes it difficult and sometimes impossible to determine who owned what and when.

Add to an already confusing chain of events, and consider that many notes were signed "in blank", shuffled around from one lender to the next and put into trusts well past the legal limit allowed and you've got a mess of epic proportions.

In the past, a bank representative or attorney for the bank would walk into court, point out that the "deadbeat homeowners" weren't paying their mortgage and the family would get kicked out. Many states adopted non-judicial foreclosure policies to alleviate unnecessary paperwork and court time. The premise being that a bank would never foreclose on a property on which the payments were being made and were certain that they owned. That worked fine and made sense when you knew who owned your loan and you owed the money to a local bank or credit union. The bank had your mortgage and your note and the Registry of Deeds has a solid record of it. If there was a transfer - something that might happen once or twice in the life of a loan, if at all, the banks would go down to the Registry of Deeds, file the assignment, pay the fee, and go on with their day. You, the borrower, would start sending your monthly checks to another bank.

Glenn Russell, one of the attorneys to have argued this case and who represented Mark and Tammy LaRace, one of the Springfield homeowners said, "In most cases banks foreclose without any detailed examination of the securitization process of the loan. After all, the homeowner hasn't paid or has missed payments and the foreclosure goes through without anyone really questioning the legality or legitimacy of the foreclosure."

Then the art of securitization came along and mortgages started being traded like baseball cards at recess, sliced up into pieces, and loaded into pools, trusts, and whatever new intricate financial instrument Wall Street dreamed up. Servicers started handling loans instead of your neighborhood bank and MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration System) was invented to further allow banks to bypass millions of dollars in fees to county registries. Of course with all of these transactions flying around in the hands of people who quite possibly didn't understand what they represented and as we've seen in the recently exposed robo-signing fiasco didn't know what they were signing, there was a lot of room for mistakes ... a lot of mistakes.

Mortgage fraud investigator Steve Dibert of MFI-Miami said, "Seventy percent of the loans we investigate are flawed due to recordation, PSA violations, etc."

As the Boston Globe reported:


During the housing boom, millions of mortgages were packaged into bonds and sold to investors, a process that resulted in lengthy and tangled paper trails that can obscure ownership. Many lenders believed they could complete foreclosure transactions and later produce formal proof they held a mortgage. Today's ruling makes it clear that the practice will not be allowed in Massachusetts.


The time-line of the case started, simply enough, back in 2007 when Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp began foreclosure proceedings against two separate delinquent borrowers. Neither borrower fought the proceedings; Massachusetts is a non-judicial state in which courts do not oversee foreclosures, so both banks seized the Springfield, MA properties without any trouble or pesky legal challenges.


In the fall of 2008 the banks tried to list the foreclosed properties in the Boston Globe. According to Mass law, like many states, foreclosure sales must be listed in a newspaper of general circulation in the county or town where the property is located, so the Globe asked the bank to get an okay from the Land Court. This is where Judge Long comes in - in March 2009.

Judge Keith C. Long had no problem with the properties being listed in the Globe, but to the shock of the attorneys he also wanted them to prove that they had legal standing to foreclose on the properties they had repossessed in the first place. He gave them until October (seven months) to get the proper paperwork together and come back and show how they had acquired the mortgage and prove that they had legal standing.

In October 2009 Judge Long examined the paperwork the banks came back with and determined that the mortgage "note" that proves who the owner is had not been properly transferred when the banks auctioned off the houses.

Judge Long found that Option One Mortgage Corp., which early in the "chain of title" owned the mortgages, erred in assigning the mortgages without naming who they were transferred to -- so- called "blank assignments."

The Supreme Court agreed:


A plaintiff that cannot make this modest showing cannot justly proclaim that it was unfairly denied a declaration of clear title. See In re Schwartz, supra at 266 ("When HomEq [Servicing Corporation] was required to prove its authority to conduct the sale, and despite having been given ample opportunity to do so, what it produced instead was a jumble of documents and conclusory statements, some of which are not supported by the documents and indeed even contradicted by them").

Judge Long's decision hit on the sensitive issue of the "assignment of mortgages in blank." In their crazed fury to aggregate and sell and then resell mortgages, many mortgage documents were transferred without explicitly naming to whom the note or mortgage was being sold.

The banks have argued (and tried to with Long) that this practice is legal. The argument being that everyone's doing it and it is standard practice in the industry. Long didn't buy it. "These blank mortgage assignments were never recorded and they were not legally recordable," he wrote in his ruling.

Where it gets interesting, is rather than take a loss and accept the ruling from a lower court - a decision that in retrospect must now seem like a good idea, in their contempt and utter lack of respect for the law, they decided to appeal to a higher authority. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, who upheld, unanimously, the lower court's decision.

We agree with the [land court] judge that the plaintiffs who were not the original mortgagees, failed to make the required showing that they were the holders of the mortgages at the time of foreclosure,'' the justices said in their opinion.

Under; Massachusetts law, in order to sell the borrowers home at a foreclosure auction, the foreclosing entity must actually be the "holder" of the right to foreclose contained in a borrowers' mortgage at the time the auction takes place.

"Looking into the not so distant future, I predict Judge Long's ruling will be hailed as one of the great Judicial opinions of all time, with regards to its impact," Attorney Glenn Russell said.

Essex County Register of Deeds John O'Brien, who in November requested that Attorney General Martha Coakley investigate whether major lenders had devised a scheme to avoid paying assignment fees when transferring mortgages from one entity to another, issued the following statement on Friday:


The Massachusetts Supreme Court has ruled that these Major Banks must follow the same laws as everyone else and that assignments are not optional in Massachusetts. It's obviously they didn't want the public to know what they were doing, coupled with their greed in trying to deliberately avoid the payment of the required recording fees, has placed them in the mess that they are in today.


This is a huge win for the taxpayers, this case will send shock waves throughout the MERS community as they now have been exposed, and they are going to have to get their checkbooks out and reimburse the taxpayers. These major banking conglomerates deliberate scheme to not file the proper paperwork together with the "robo-signers scandal" are the major reasons why our housing market is in the economic turmoil it is in today.


Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley issued her own statement making her opinion about the financial industry clear.


We continue to suffer from the fallout of the lending crisis. There are thousands of people in our state who have lost their homes and many more still in danger of losing them. This decision affirms our belief that the onus should be on the banks and other holders of notes to follow proper procedures before initiating foreclosure on any Massachusetts homeowner.


In their careless and hasty stampede to securitize loans, the banks moved at their own peril. Whether by robo-signing or failing to properly transfer title, these financial institutions created this real estate chaos. They should bear the brunt and the cost of the remedy.



As for the spin coming from the banks as they try to deflect this, Attorney Glenn Russell had this to say on his site:


As I represented one of the parties in the Land Court cases (the LaRace family), it is very interesting to listen to the so called "experts" opine on Judge Long's ruling, saying that "at best this will delay foreclosures, but that is about it." These are uninformed and usually self-serving statements made by real estate professionals. Left unsaid is the fact that under G.L. c. 244 Section 14, in order to foreclose, the foreclosing entity must also prove that it is the holder of the borrowers mortgage note as well. The complexity of the securitization process can present difficult issues for lender to overcome.


Generally the parties involved in the securitization process of your mortgage did not follow the mandates under the prospectus supplement and pooling and servicing agreement governing the securitized trust that the note and mortgage are in. Additionally problematic for foreclosing entities, is the situation whereby the lender has already sold a property to an innocent third party (that it didn't really own, according to Judge Long's decision).


Taking into consideration that the Massachusetts Supreme Court is widely considered one of the best courts in the country, there's a good chance that other states will soon follow this decision.

Judge Long and the six jurists of the Massachusetts Supreme Court sent a very clear message to the banks on Friday: This is the law... And the law matters.

Join the hundreds of homeowners and tell your mortgage horror story and help us fight together at ShameTheBanks.org

Friday, January 7, 2011

Another Victory

Jonathan Stempel and Dena Aubin) - In a ruling that may affect foreclosures nationwide, Massachusetts' highest court voided the seizure of two homes by Wells Fargo & Co and US Bancorp after the banks failed to show they held the mortgages at the time they foreclosed



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/07/top-massachusetts-court-r_n_805846.html

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

First Victory comes in Small Claims Court!

Homeonwer beats Bank of America!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/04/homeowner-beats-bank-of-a_n_804171.html

Sunday, January 2, 2011

This article is worth reading if you are trying to decide if you should walk.

Sounds like the book might be worth taking a look at also, although I abhor those stupid titles!


http://www.smartmoney.com/personal-finance/real-estate/walking-away-from-your-home-for-dummies/