While driving around your community, you may have seen signs posted on telephone poles that offer “foreclosure help.” These seemingly generous offers to help financially troubled homeowners who are in danger of losing their homes to foreclosure are actually scams. Typically, the “help” comes in the form of an offer to buy the home for a reduced price from the homeowner. The scammer offers to pay off the homeowner’s existing
debt and to rent the home back to the homeowner until they can afford to buy the home back. The scam comes after the owner signs the paperwork and the offer to rent the home to them abruptly disappears, leaving the scammer with an inexpensive house and the homeowner without a house or a place to live. Fortunately, the current booming
real estate market has made it possible for financially troubled homeowners to avoid foreclosure on their home and the scammers.
Foreclosure usually occurs after a homeowner fails to make his or her mortgage payments for a period of several consecutive months. Lenders are often willing to accommodate minor financial troubles from their borrowers, but sometimes, they have no choice but to evict the homeowner and sell the home. This is usually done at a public auction, as lenders place more importance on getting money back quickly than in getting the highest price the property can yield. While the national foreclosure rate has been fairly steady, it has been increasing in several states, notably Texas and Florida. While losing a home due to lack of payment is generally financially catastrophic for homeowners, the current market has offered many financially troubled homeowners a simple way out - they can sell the home.
The price of homes nationwide has skyrocketed in the last few years, and in many markets, values have doubled or ever tripled. Many homeowners now have huge amounts of equity in their homes and that equity often exceeds the amount owed on the primary mortgage. That may be little consolation to a homeowner who has just lost his or her job, but the homeowner now has another option besides watching the bank sell the home from under their feet. The homeowner can now sell the home, pay off the mortgage and often pocket some cash at the same time. In most markets, this can be accomplished rather quickly, before foreclosure proceedings take place. The debtor will no longer have a place to live, but the debt will be repaid, and he or she will often have quite a bit of cash left over. This is certainly a better option than either dealing with a scammer or losing the home to foreclosure.
Anyone with financial troubles that prevents them from making their house payments should consult with their lender first. Lenders aren’t really interested in removing people from their homes unless it’s absolutely necessary. Still, it is comforting to know that the current market may provide a somewhat more attractive alternative that may actually yield some cash.
©Copyright 2005 by Retro Marketing. Charles Essmeier is the owner of Retro Marketing, a firm devoted to informational Websites, including End-Your-Debt.com, a Website devoted to debt consolidation and credit counseling information and HomeEquityHelp.net, a site devoted to information on mortgages and home equity loans.
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The most expensive thing most people will buy in their lifetime is the house in which they live. In addition to being expensive and taking decades to pay for, the purchase of a house also represents one of the more complicated legal transactions most people will ever encounter. Despite the need for contracts involving bankers, city, state and county
tax assessors and other legal entities involved in the sale of land, most people never even consider hiring an attorney to assist them with the purchase of a home. That’s unfortunate, as the relatively small amount of money saved by hiring an attorney now could possibly
save thousands of dollars later.
How can an attorney save you money? By double-checking all of the terms and documents of the transaction to make sure everything is legal and proper. Most people who buy homes don’t bother to check zoning ordinances or whether or not the home or fence on their property encroaches on that of a neighbor. An attorney can check these things along with tax issues and any one of a number of minor things that most buyers never even know to think about.
Right now in Texas, a number of homeowners who lost their homes to foreclosure are engaged in lawsuits against the company that sold them their houses. Among the allegations in the case are suggestions that the company that sold the property did such things as:
Tell buyers with bad credit and even previous bankruptcies that they qualified for unusually large home loans. Some of these loans had monthly payments that exceeded 50% of the buyers’ monthly income. In short, they agreed to lend buyers money that they knew the buyers could not afford to repay.
Provide buyers with mortgage documents that stated that the property wasn’t being resold but was rather being refinanced by existing owners.
Offer loan documents that contained a number of blanks which the sellers filled in sometime after closing. Buyers were later shocked to discover that their monthly mortgage payments were much higher than they had been promised.
Showed the buyers fraudulent appraisals that suggested that the property in question was worth 2-3 times its actual value.
A lawyer would have caught any one of these problems, had even one of the displaced homeowners bothered to hire one ahead of time. And yet hundreds of buyers appear to have been victims of mortgage fraud because they weren’t willing to spend a few hundred dollars to have an attorney look over the documents before they signed them.
Buying a house is agreeing to an obligation that can tie up your finances for decades. It only seems reasonable that if you are going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a place to live, you might want to consider spending hundreds of dollars to make sure that the terms of your purchase are legal and reasonable. A little money spent now could save you a lot of money later.
©Copyright 2006 by Retro Marketing. Charles Essmeier is the owner of Retro Marketing, a firm devoted to informational Websites, including HomeEquityHelp.net, a site devoted to information regarding mortgages and home equity loans.
Tags: debt consolidation, home appraisa, home equity loan, line of credit, second mortgage, tax deductibledebt consolidation, home appraisa, home equity loan, line of credit, second mortgage, tax deductibleShare This