Can you afford to cram down a mortgage when cram down is permitted? Mortgages on a debtor’s home are protected from cram down in Chapter 13 by 1322(b)(2). Mortgages on any other kind of real estate can be reduced to the value at filing of the collateral securing the debt as of the date of […]
How Long Til Foreclosure?
Everyone who has made the painful decision to let an unaffordable house go to foreclosure wants to know: how long before they have to get out. While the statutory foreclosure process in California , on paper, takes a little more than 4 months, if the the creditor is perfectly efficient, creditors aren’t perfectly efficient. In […]
Tax Fallout from Foreclosure & Loan Modification
It’s bad enough when the client loses their home to foreclosure, but it’s a double whammy when the tax bill arrives for money they never saw. Scope out the tax traps in the world of indebted clients at a 2 hour workshop for lawyers and tax professionals April 9 at Lincoln Law School. Be prepared […]
New California law protects sellers in short sales
Effective January 1, 2011, a lender who approves a short sale of California residential property may not look to the seller for the shortfall. The addition to the California Code of Civil Procedure at Section 580(e) applies only to properties of one to four units and has an exception if the seller commits waste or […]
Rant on realtors
Or maybe this is just a continuing, disappointed sigh that this group, who tries to build a profession around selling houses, is itself oversold. Latest example arose where a homeowner was referred to me by his accountant, concerned about a pending short sale of the client’s home. By our rough calculations, the short sale of […]
Guilt & fear used to keep homeowners paying
Susanne Robicsek’s post on the futility of keeping a home through bankruptcy brought to mind Professor Brent White’s paper on the use by government and financial counselors of fear and shame to keep people paying on mortgages on underwater homes. White cites a litany of messages from apparently credible sources who chant that a foreclosure […]
Loan modification resources
The good folks at the National Consumer Law Center have put together a page of links to various programs and procedures for troubled home loans. My colleague John Mlnarik has begun a discussion of the Obama Treasury programs announced earlier in March on www.norcalmortgagemods.com. Now, we need the Senate to move on S. 61 and […]
Take that, and that, you mortgage lender
It was a good day at my desk, if one has to work on Saturdays. I gave notice that one client was rescinding a $180,000 mortgage for Truth in Lending violations. I found three clients whose second deeds of trust can be eliminated as liens on homes because they are completely underwater. I sent out […]
Case of the vanishing home equity
My friend Kurt O’Keefe writes about the 6 trillion dollars in home equity than has evaporated in the mortgage meltdown. When I look around me in the Silicon Valley and environs, I question just how real that equity really was. Reckless lending practices made a vast pool of people potential buyers for a limited quantity […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 8
- 9
- 10