To set up the situation and timeline:
June 2010 - husband's income drops by a third due to commission structure changes. Then the local economy tanks, resulting in fewer sales to make commission on, and his pay is more like half of what it was. And about a quarter of what it normally is at that time of year. The first mortgage payment is missed. BOA (Bank of America) says they'll just add it to the end.
2010 - economy never picks back up. We get behind and try to set up a payment plan... they don't. They don't say yes or no. In the fall, they say to stop making any payments (we sent what we could and they kept sending them back) and they'll get us signed up for a grant to pay off up to a year of hardship payments... and will set us up with a new monthly payment - far lower by reducing interest - through HAMP.
May 2011 - the grant goes through and mortgage is made current. BOA says to wait on making payments because they haven't changed the re-fi loan terms. They'll let us know next month.
June 2011 - husband and a handful of co-workers are laid off. We call BOA and they offer to waive mortgage payments for 3 months... they still haven't changed the loan. They stress to not make any payments until the new loan agreement has been sent.
2011-2012 - They send us forms, every 2-3 months, of exactly the same HAMP refi paperwork. 27 pages each time. They keep saying they didn't receive it. We do certified mail, return receipt. We fax. We go to the local BOA branch and have the branch manager fax from her machine. We have her scan and email it to them. We send certified/RR AGAIN... over and over. 13 times, with confirmation of transmission/receipt every.single.time. We keep getting statements that we're behind by x-amount, every month. They return any payments we send and we end up locked out of the online option/account. They won't restore it until the refi goes through.
January 2013 - we are served with an intent to foreclose... a lis pendens. Husband FINALLY finds a new job... LESS than unemployment but still, a job. With months of no income and having gone through savings, we decide to file bankruptcy.
Feb. 2013 - we get our tax refund, which will pay for a cheap car with no loan and for the bankruptcy.
March 2013 - Bankruptcy is filed. A stay is put on the lis pendens.
June 2013 - Bankruptcy goes through and is complete. We no longer owe for the mortgage but since, in NY State, the deed/title is separate from the loan, we still legally own the house.
September 2013 - We receive notification that Ocwen is our new loan servicer... a week later, I receive notification that BOA has been paid for the defaulted loan by FHA. I also receive a separate - the first - statement from Ocwen, detailing the loan amount (full loan amount plus months in default and servicing fees) and asking for the original mortgage payment. We cannot risk speaking to them on the phone because it's possible to verbally re-affirm the mortgage (which was cleared in the bankruptcy) that way, by accident. I know we don't have to pay them anything and that they may not even attempt to collect the old debt.
November 2013 - Ocwen sends notice that the loan balance is 7% of the original.
December 2013 - Ocwen reverts to the original, full balance on its statement.
Present- What the heck is the status of our situation? We're not even in default, according to Ocwen, yet. We WILL NOT re-affirm the debt or refinance new terms. If the house was sold - it's 100 years old, has old electrical and plumbing, no insulation in much of it, no bathrooms on the second floor, and a tilted slab foundation - it MIGHT get as much as 60% of the loan balance. It's liveable but improvements we'd been making have stopped and we don't know the status... so should we even be making improvements or just making it liveable, if we're going to leave anyway? From all the confusion, it really seems like they've just let our account fester... they don't know what's happening and BOA (formerly Countrywide) was paid for the loan.
Does BOA's lis pendens from a year ago still stand? Could it have been transferred to Ocwen or would Ocwen need to file their own? Is it possible for us to succeed in petitioning for the removal of the lien off our title/deed so we can sell the house for whatever we can and move on? Ocwen is under investigation by the NY Attorney General for deceptive practices and fraud already, btw.
I know it all sounds terrible but at this point, I just want something solid. BOA *both* refused payment *and* refused to refinance... and strung us along, defaulting more and more each month, until they said that refis were closed. With no determination because "we haven't received all the paperwork." I'm just DONE. We felt terrible right up until about the 4th time they said they didn't receive the modification paperwork... when we went to their loan mod EVENT, locally, and their own rep personally took every.single.one of those 27 pages PLUS bill and income and identification verification, handed us a confirmation and copies, signed his name to it, and then BOA's rep said there were pages missing and we'd have to do it AGAIN. And we did- over and over with the same result. I'm done feeling guilty about this. Foreclose and auction the house so we can move. (We're not leaving this house before it's sold - IF it ever gets auctioned - to rot in a good neighborhood... and it would fall apart, even without vandalism, because we're constantly fixing things for basic living still.) Or admit you can't foreclose and we'll fix it up a little more and sell it for whatever we can.
If they CAN'T foreclose because they know they can't prove they hold the loan, how would we go about achieving that? Thank you, in advance!
