Associated Press writer Alan Fram reports that 1 in 7 homeowners predict that they might not be able to make their mortgage payments. This is a shocking and dismal statistic that is ignored by our country’s leaders. Nothing is being done to help homeowners, PERIOD.
If you are a distressed homeowner, you are on your own [...]

Katie Porter thinks you don’t get it, judges, legislators and regulators. Professor Porter, of the University of Iowa College of Law, thinks you do not understand the competing interests between a mortgage owner and a mortgage servicer. And if you don’t get it, how do you expect the legions of borrowers to understand [...]

I got a taste of the present, bizarre aspect of bankruptcy law this week when I could help one new client strip down an underwater second mortgage on an investment property, but could not do the same for the next client’s family home.
What’s wrong with this picture when the investor who buys a single family [...]

The FHA federal mortgage insurance program is being expanded to protect banks from losses on loans that exceed home values in exchange for helping homeowners nearing foreclosure to refinance. The stated goal is, “one hand washes the other,” but what does it really mean for you?
If you liked that post, then try these…FED Prints [...]

Fuelling the over-heated housing market a couple of years back was real estate investing, and the result today is a condo market where units are selling for half of what people paid for them in 2005. Anyone who purchased a condominium as an investment must have realized the potential to lose money, no matter how [...]

Ohio Treasurer Richard Cordray today joined Governor Ted Strickland and Department of Commerce Director Kimberly Zurz in announcing that nine mortgage loan servicers agreed to sign a “Compact to Help Ohioans Preserve Homeownership.” This begs the question, however, of whether this is nothing more than sound and fury, signifying nothing.
If you liked that post, [...]

We’ve seen the Senate punk on bankruptcy reform that would actually help consumers and the economy, we’ve seen the President’s largely useless, fox-in-charge-of-the-henhouse Hope Now program. This week the House takes up the foreclosure crisis and its affect on the economy at large.
The House is expected to craft its own bill and [...]

It sounds exactly like the standard consumer mortgage nightmare: Buying a place that’s really bigger than you need. For more than you really can afford to pay. Then your income gets cut. And the financing gets more expensive too. Stop me if you think you’ve heard this story before.
No, you [...]

Bloomberg is reporting that mortgage lenders are so swamped with foreclosures that they are stalling their own foreclosure cases.
The Mortgage Bankers Association notes that the number of borrowers at least 90 days late on their home loans rose to 3.6 percent at the end of December, the highest in at least five years. Lenders, [...]

Many of us have blogged in vain thus far, as Congress and the Fed continue to dole out billions to bail out the mortgage companies and investment bankers, while ignoring bankruptcy law reform that would cost the taxpayer nothing.
And the Fed, who caused the sub-prime crisis with Greenspan’s bubble, [...]