First thing to remember is that you have rights. Whether the financial issues you are having are of your doing or not, you have rights. Research the process and see what your options are as soon as you realize that there is a potential issue. The last thing that you want to do is to try and figure things out when you are in a time constraint because that is when you start to make mistakes which can be costly. As we mentioned, you have rights. Know what they are in your state and situation and take action to assertively protect your rights.
Lenders are capable of making mistakes. Just because you might get a notice saying that your mortgage is messed up in some way, do not automatically assume that they are right and start to panic. Research again and see what the facts are before you do anything. One huge common mistake that lenders and their attorneys make is to forget to sign the documents that are sent out.. They can miss or totally blow deadlines for getting things done. Some of them can even failure to properly apply payments to the account that you sent. Some of these are annoyances others can be grounds for prevention of the lender being able to foreclose on your property. So keep track of all your correspondence with them because a simple clerical error can be the difference between losing your home and winning a court battle. As strange as it sounds it happens all of the time.
Fight back even if you are in the wrong. The more you fight back, the more time you will have in your home. If you do everything by the book it is not uncommon for a person to stall final foreclosure for up to three years with appeals and such. Not by falsifying information but by using all of the options afforded to you by the laws of the country and your state. That is because it takes time for the lawyers and the court to figure things out and then respond. And since the court dockets are filled to over flowing with foreclosure cases, It can take many months or even years to exhaust all avenues. This will give you time to either find another way to pay off the house or to pay off other debt so that once the battle is over you can mover on literally debt free. If nothing else responding and working things out this way gives you time to figure out the next move that you need to make.
Banks and lenders prefer money over owning lots of foreclosed properties. For this reason alone you might find that a lender today is much more willing to get a line of dialog going and try to work out a solution with you rather than simply saying no.
Julie Thompson, has been working on ForeclosureDataOnline.com studying the foreclosures market, helping buyers on the finer points of Boca Raton foreclosed homes.
