Stop Foreclosure Answer

Do you remember hearing that there’s no such thing as a stupid question? That’s not exactly true. The stupid question is the one that doesn’t get asked! This is never been more true than it is with regards to your mortgage

If you are having an issue with your mortgage company whether you are in foreclosure or you’re just behind on your payments, there’s a valuable tool available to you provided for by federal law. This is known as a “qualified request” for information. I said in my book that I think sometimes the bank is just foreclosing out of tradition and not because they actually have the right to do it. This is your opportunity to find out.

The law provides that if you write a “qualified request” to the mortgage company, they must respond in a specified period of time. If they fail to respond in that specified period of time, they are subject to penalties. In your qualified request, you can ask all the things that you ever wanted to know about your mortgage. Things you might want to know are, who owns the mortgage, who owns the note, how much do I owe, what is my interest rate, what is the pay off figure for my loan, are there any fees and charges applied to my loan, and any other thing that you could think that you want to ask about your loan. This is your opportunity to do it.

Once you have this information, you be in a better position to decide what to do with it. Certainly knowing these things will be useful in a negotiation for modification, defending a lawsuit for foreclosure or simply assessing your situation.

You’ll never believe what happened to me when I wrote a “qualified request” recently to a bank, with whom I was negotiating. Two weeks after they got my letter they sent me a letter back that effectively said, “we don’t know who you are or why you think you have a loan with us”! It also said, “all of our loans have been sold and are now owned by someone else”.

The significance of this is that the mortgage company that wrote the letter cannot now foreclose. In the lawsuit a bank files for foreclosure, they state up front who they are and why they’re allowed to sue. They will state that they are a bank and that they lent you money, which you didn’t pay, so now they’re entitled to sue you to get the money. This means that somebody handed the lawyers a case with instructions to sue, the lawyers wrote the standard suit and followed the banks instructions. Unfortunately for the lawyers, the bank says that the borrower in this case doesn’t owe them the money. If the borrower doesn’t owe them money, there can be no foreclosure.

Many of these banks were in such a hurry to get your money by making loans, they didn’t pay attention to the small things. In this case, a small thing would have secured their rights and they didn’t do it!

How did I find out this information that stops the foreclosure in its tracks? I asked for it in a “qualified request” for information. Don’t let the small things slip past you! Read my book. You’ll learn how to find them and make them work to your advantage.

Go get ‘em!

Mark