SELLING BEFORE FORECLOSURE
Protecting Your Equity
When you find yourself in a situation where you can’t afford your mortgage all of the choices are painful, but some are more painful than others. You can stop paying the mortgage and let the lender foreclose or you can leave the home and either rent it or sell it to someone else while you live elsewhere. This is a “have your cake and eat it too scenario;” if you live in your house you’re eating the cake and it’s going to go down with a lot of stress as you watch your credit get ruined as you burn through your equity. If you move and rent the house for the income, or sell it you keep the cake, but that also means a painful goodbye to the place you have called home. These are emotional decisions, but it’s important to think clearly so that you don’t make things worse; first of all by going into default.
When you receive a Notice of Default from your mortgage servicer and trustee, foreclosure has begun and they now have their hooks in you. Now, you might find your mortgage servicer interfering with your ability to sell by refusing to send a pay-off amount to your escrow company or adding outrageous fees that you will then have to agree to before you can sell. Once you are in default and in foreclosure they have you in a vulnerable position because if you make the choice to sell you are agreeing to the fees and you won’t be able to sue them afterwards.
STAYING OUT OF FORECLOSURE
If you have let things go too long and find that you have received a Notice of Default, the first thing you need to do is get out of foreclosure. You do this by reinstating the mortgage which means paying what you owe and getting that Notice of Default Rescinded. You start the process by sending a certified letter to the trustee named on the Notice of Default demanding a reinstatement amount, payment instructions, and a window of time when that amount will be correct. After the trustee complies with this request, and you pay the amount (usually much less than the amount on the Notice of Default) the trustee will rescind the Notice of Default by recording a rescission with the county recorder and you will be out of foreclosure. At that point, you will be out of foreclosure and can sell without being at the mercy of your servicer. Now that you are out of foreclosure, you can also dispute any additional fees that the servicer has charged you by taking them to small claims court.
Financing to prevent foreclosure and allow you time to sell
Ideally when a setback happens it is minor and temporary so that you can dip into savings or borrow from relatives and get yourself quickly out of default. When the setback is more serious and a sale is the only solution Advocate Legal has a pool of ethical investors to help you retain as much profit as possible from the sale of your home. This may come through a sale to one of our investors directly or through a partnership with an investor from our group that will allow you to fix up your home and list it with a real estate agent for maximum value. When borrowers have equity in their homes, this extra time to sell on the open market may mean hundreds of thousands of additional dollars in your pocket.
Contact Advocate Legal for Financing Help today
With over a decade of experience that includes foreclosure, mortgage fraud, financing and title issues, our lawyers at Advocate Legal have the knowledge and skill, as well as a team of people to tap into, to help you get the best price for your home.