Foreclosures, Mortgages

FHA has announced new help for homeowners having trouble paying their FHA-insured mortgage loans. This article explains the seven key changes, including minimized documentation requirements, new home retention options, and access of successors-in-interest to FHA loss mitigation. This article describes the changes and provides links for more detail on each change.

This article examines three current forms of home equity theft: offering realtor services to create liens on homes, buying homes below market value before they are listed, and sale-leasebacks schemes. The article describes each scam, current litigation, common features of home equity theft, and twelve different legal theories for homeowners to seek relief. Links are provided for more detail.

Important new rules go into effect on December 1 to protect homeowners who use chapter 13 bankruptcies to stave off foreclosures and keep themselves current on their mortgages. A new NCLC Digital Library article explains eight ways that the new rules protect such homeowners by giving them information needed to successfully complete a cure plan and emerge from chapter 13 without surprise, undisclosed fees, or payment amounts due.

Home equity “investment” (HEI) loans are a growing predatory loan scam. Homeowners are offered cash without monthly payments, but these loans’ true cost can be astronomical. This article examines recent Ninth Circuit and other court decisions upholding claims against HEI loans and provides practice pointers in suing HEI lenders, including claims, successfully framing a complaint, and how to avoid arbitration.

As the name suggests, zombie mortgages can be terrifying. They rise from the dead, appear without warning, and seize homes. And they are appearing now more than ever. A new NCLC Digital Library article explains what they are, why they are now such a problem, and fifteen ways homeowners can stop foreclosures of zombie mortgages. The article also links to additional resources.

A hidden and expensive cost homeowners increasingly face occurs when their servicers force-place hazard insurance and charge homeowners for that insurance. This article explains abuses related to force-placed insurance, why the force-placement is growing so dramatically, and homeowners’ best practices and RESPA rights and remedies to respond to both the wrongful and even the appropriate force-placement of insurance.

This article provides 12 tips for homeowners working to recover from a natural disaster, with links to a free treatise chapter for more detail: applying for FEMA assistance and other grants; problems with insurance, home repair scams, and municipal codes; essential new options for disaster-related mortgage loan forbearance and loan modification; and key steps to prepare for the next disaster.

This article explains the broader and practical implications of a May 25 Supreme Court decision that a local government taking of a home at a property tax foreclosure violated the Fifth Amendment’s Taking Clause. Also analyzed are property tax foreclosure issues not resolved by the decision, as well as eleven practical tips to avoid loss of a home for unpaid property taxes, with links to additional resources.

A new NCLC Digital Library article sets out practical solutions to problems arising from a homeowner's death in dealing with mortgages, foreclosures, reverse mortgages, property taxes and tax sales, utilities, and relief after natural disasters. The advice focuses where a home’s title is tangled—the home is stuck in probate or families living in a home for generations have never properly transferred the home’s title.