Family to lose home because of seven cents
10th August, 2009 - Posted by admin - 2 Comments
Pres. Barack Obama wants mortgage companies to do everything in their power to prevent families from losing their homes to foreclosure. You can bet he's not thrilled with a story that ran earlier today in the USA Today.
The story highlights the plight of a Michigan family that is losing its home because it underpaid its home mortgage by seven cents.
The family, according to the story, does have a "spotty" history of paying its mortgage. But still, you'd think that with all the negative press facing mortgage lenders, and with the current presidential administration working so hard to promote loan modifications designed to keep families from losing their homes, that Bank of America, the mortgage servicer that currently holds the family's loan, would be willing to give the family a bit of leeway.
It's certainly an interesting case. The family underpaid its mortgage when a postal clerk made a seven-cent error. Bank of America, though, said that this isn't the first time the family has been delinquent. A spokesperson for Bank of America even told the USA Today that there is no story of a "7-cent foreclosure." Bank of America, in fact, has tried to work with the family on its mortgage problems, to no avail, the spokesperson said.
Like I said, it's an interesting story. It's a bit hard to feel sorry for a homeowner who's missed so many payments in the past, and then actually went the extra step of refusing help from a mortgage-servicing company. But it's hard, too, to feel sorry for Bank of America. The company's loan officers certainly helped give a boost to the mortgage crisis with all the bad loans the company passed out during the housing boom.
The story gets even more interesting when you consider that the family's home loan was originally taken out by Countrywide, which Bank of America eventually bought. Countrywide has become a symbol of the mortgage industry's incompetence, a deserved symbol. Countrywide is famous, basically, for being one of the biggest dispenser of bad mortgage loans during the housing boom.
So, who do you root for in a story like this? Beats me. But it shows pretty clearly just how screwy the mortgage industry became during those heady days of the residential housing boom.
Posted on: August 10, 2009
Filed under: mortgage news
2 Comments
odir gutierrez
February 20th, 2010 at 9:13 am
i don’t know if seven cents is the cause to loose a home,but is a fact that bank of america does force families to loose their homes. i am one of many that is facing the sad reality of loosing ours. my wife and i have being doing all we can to save our home.my wife lost her job and after a year trying to negotiate with bank of america and after false promises, they finaly answered us back, just to let us know that they were droping a point on a 8 1/2% interet loan, after a year, with no answers we were back to square one.we want to pay our morgage, but not with this interest rate. i’m not a rocket scientist, just a construction worker and i do not understand the logic of bank of america forcing us to short sale our house for 240,000$ when our existing morgage is 360,000$ and all we asking for is to modified our loan. we want to pay our morgage if tehey can only change our interest rate wich is what the president was asking the banks to do. mi question is whats the bank’s profit of short selling or foreclose an a house for less money and lower interest rate, we are holding a bigger morgage and a high interest rate, isn’t better for the bank to low our rate? and let us keep the house then to loose more then a 100,000 $ or foreclosing. thank you
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February 8th, 2011 at 6:45 pm
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